


Silver & Sapphire

by LittleRedPencil



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Season/Series 08 Finale
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2020-03-17 15:23:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18967966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedPencil/pseuds/LittleRedPencil
Summary: IF YOU'RE READING THIS VIA THE UNAUTHORIZED, FOR PROFIT POCKET APP, PLEASE BE AWARE YOU ARE PART OF THE REASON I'M CONSIDERING REMOVING MY WORK.Please don't support ripoff programs that are trying to make money off fanworks. Do not donate to these apps or purchase premium features.----+The war for the fate of the universe was supposed to end when Allura sacrificed herself to save realities. Altea returned, so did Daibazaal, and the Lions eventually disappeared into obscurity. But it takes more than hope to end the ten-thousand-year reign of a universe-wide empire, and now the Coalition is finding that the war with the splintered Galran factions has only just begun in earnest.Curtis Duchesne, now Captain of the special forces frigate Themis, is unlucky enough to find something very sensitive left behind by Honerva while doing a search and salvage of a hidden, deactivated Galra ship.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This work is canon-compliant. It takes place several years after the ending of VLD S8, including the post-credits "epilogues."

HORMONE LEVELS RISING_  
  
ADRENALINE: ABOVE OPTIMAL  
NOREPINEPHRINE: ABOVE OPTIMAL  
CORTISOL: ABOVE OPTIMAL_  
  
RUN PROGRAM: OVERDRIVE PROTOCOL_  
  
DISPENSE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY  
DISPENSE STEROID  
DISPENSE INHIBITION BLOCKER  
SUPPRESS PAIN RESPONSE_  
  
RUN PROGRAM: KURON INDEPENDENCE PROTOCOL_  
  
IF THREAT == [PALADIN]:  
ACTIVATE COMMAND [TERMINATE];

IF THREAT == [ALTEAN]:  
ACTIVATE COMMAND [TERMINATE];

IF ELSE:  
ACTIVATE COMMAND [IDENTIFICATION PROTOCOL];

* * * * *

The black-armored combatant took the full weight of his opponent in the chest as the Red Paladin used a broken wire to swing on for leverage. Kuron stumbled but didn’t feel any pain in spite of the force of the blow, backing away as Keith swung wildly with the sharp purple blade of his mother’s Marmora knife.

They hit the edge of the facility platform and Kuron was momentarily pinned, but the setback wasn’t for long. He knew all of Keith’s moves, he knew how to throw him off, and he easily twisted and used his own blade to send the younger man’s flying away.

Keith made a run for it but Kuron followed, pushing through on the offensive and not giving him a chance to recover. Keith took a hit and flew back into a support scaffold, ducking and rolling as the blade came at him again. It sheered clear through the scaffold’s metal, bringing it crashing down between them and barely missing them both.

“Shiro, I know you’re in there,” Keith said desperately. “You made a promise once, you told me you’d never give up on me.”

* * * * *

TEMPORAL LOBE ACTIVITY RISING_  
  
SUPPRESS LIMBIC SYSTEM  
IDENTIFY THREAT_  
  
TARGET CLARIFIED: RED PALADIN , ‘KEITH’ , ‘MULLET’ , ‘DROPOUT’ , ‘TEAM LEADER’  
  
TARGET ANALYSIS: ‘INSECURE, ISOLATED, HIGHLY IRRITABLE; ORPHAN: FATHER DECEASED, MOTHER ABANDONED; FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIP’ ;  
  
RECOMMENDED ACTION: EMOTIONAL COMPROMISE; TARGET CLASSIFIED AS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, MUST BE COMPLETELY DISASSEMBLED ;  
  
RUN PROGRAM: FACILITY LOCKDOWN  
RUN PROGRAM: POD DESTRUCTION  
REROUTE ALL POWER TO LIMB PROSTHETIC MODEL GLR58392  
  
INITIATE PROGRAM: UNIT TRANSFER  
RUN PROGRAM: UNIT SELF DESTRUCT_

* * * * *

“And I should’ve abandoned you, just like your parents did,” Kuron answered. “They saw that you were broken and worthless, I should have seen it too.”

“I’m not leaving here without you,” Keith insisted.

Kuron sighed, shaking his head in dark amusement. Around him, the clone pods began shutting down, processing the wireless commands currently being sent through the entire facility.

“Actually, neither of us are leaving.”

At the center of the facility platform, the core support and processor began to activate, the soft lights powering up into glaring purple. Power began rerouting into Kuron’s prosthetic arm, charging it up well beyond it’s normal functioning capacity.

The blast it activated severed half the platform and sheered some of the supports from the stone of the moon, further destabilizing the entire facility. The secondary blast was aimed straight at Keith, just barely missing him as he took a leap of faith down to the secondary platform below.

It became a game of cat and mouse as Keith did his best to avoid getting hit, unaware that each blast intentionally weakened the integrity of the facility. This base was compromised, other Paladins might trace Keith here sooner than later, and everything here needed to be destroyed before they arrived. Keith was ultimately the target, but with every few feet of solid ground lost he became an easier and easier target to find.

As the last section of clone pods was cut free from the rock, sent to burn up in the atmosphere of the planet below, Kuron dropped down to where Keith lay weakly on the lowest remaining platform. There wasn’t much left here, and even this space would soon be sent hurtling down, but as long as the target remained active he was a threat. Kuro arced his blade downward, aiming to hit Keith in the neck, but the kid still had a little bit of fight in him. He managed to grab his knife and block the blow, if barely.

Struggling to push Kuron back, struggling even to breathe after the excessive impact of his last fall, Keith was not giving in easily.

“Shiro, please,” he begged, still refusing to fight back with his full strength. “You’re my brother. I love you.”

“Just let go, Keith,” Kuron advised, forcing his blade downward bit by bit. “You don’t have to fight anymore. The rest of the team’s already gone, I saw to it myself.”

He almost had it, he was almost there. Another inch and the blade would cleave flesh, the fight would be over and all of the evidence would be washed away in the burn of atmospheric friction. And then Keith surprised him, shifting just enough to call his bayard and sever his prosthetic with a well-aimed swing.

* * * * *

TEMPORAL LOBE ACTIVITY: CRITICAL  
ADRENALINE: CRITICAL  
NOREPINEPHRINE: CRITICAL  
CORTISOL: CRITICAL_  
  
PROSTHETIC POWER SOURCE HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED  
SHUTDOWN IMMINENT_  
  
DISABLE ANTI-INFLAMMATORY  
DISABLE STEROID  
DISABLE INHIBITION BLOCKER  
REENABLE PAIN RESPONSE_  
  
DEACTIVATE ALL OVERRIDE CONTROLS  
RUN PROGRAM: UNIT TRANSFER_

* * * * *

It was like waking up from a nightmare, sudden and jarring with the feeling of his heart freezing up in his chest. Cold claws that had been dug deep into his brain released suddenly, and his body quickly drained of strength.

Kuron sank down to his knees, confused and in pain. He was horrified to find that it wasn’t a dream, that he was really here on this failing platform on a misformed moon. He wanted to speak, wanted to scream for Keith to get out of here and get somewhere safe, but even that took more energy than he had.

And then he was under attack again, a new wave of control washing over him and wiping away any willpower he had. But this was worse than anything that had happened so far, so much worse, as he felt the energy running through him.

He’d felt this before, Haggar’s manipulation of quintessence, her dark alchemy that she had spent ten thousand years perfecting. Magic mixed with machines, digging into his very being and ripping him away.

Kuron had only a moment to realize what was happening, the chilling knowledge that Haggar had regularly torn those that displeased her from their bodies and implanted them into her robeasts. Disposed of their flesh and buried them in her own twisted, metallic creations. He knew that was what was coming, that letting him die here and find peace was simply too much of a kindness for her to allow. She was going to take him from here, use her alchemy to move him into something else, some dark creation she wished to animate but was unable to create new life to fill.

Two heartbeats passed, cold and steeped in unadulterated terror, before everything went black and he was conscious of nothing. His body fell to the platform, just one more discarded piece of property. Nothing more than an empty shell, left behind to burn up with all the others falling down to the planet below.


	2. Chapter 2

“Radiation levels are normal, no atmosphere detected. I’m seeing colorless liquid droplets floating all over…I can’t get a reading on them from here, but from experience my guess is UDMH and N2O4.”

“ _Roger that. How is pressurization? Are the gravity simulators working_?” The voice of Ensign Steuber came over the comm earpiece he wore, stiff and professional.

Curtis closed his eyes and took a slow breath through his nose. He had always wanted to get away from being stuck behind a desk, but he was finding out that hands on work was no better. Nobody read his emails before asking stupid questions back in the office, and clearly nobody paid attention here when he talked.

“Just out of curiosity, what are the conditions on your planet that liquid forms floating droplets when gravity is working?” Curtis asked. “Your planet is Earth, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten.”

A brief moment of silence, then: _“Are you able to get the doors open wider and board the ship?”_

“Do you even know what UDMH and N2O4 are?” Curtis asked in disbelief. “They’re an oxidizer and a jet fuel. Did you even read the mission briefing? When did you graduate the academy, Ensign?”

There was another pause, then a sheepish reply. “ _Six months ago, sir._ ”

Curtis leaned against the doorway in the dark airlock, counting to ten. Six months. They’d sent a six-month graduate out into the most dangerous depths of space, knowing how bad it could get out here. He knew he couldn’t blame the brass for sending him somebody who was at least a little bit green, most of the older and wiser soldiers had been either killed or injured in the post-Empire war, but six months was really pushing it.

“UDMH is Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine,” Curtis explained, motioning for the two soldiers with him to back away from the inner airlock door and head back out of the decrepit old Galra cruiser. “N2O4 is Dinitrogen tetroxide. The two were used in very old rocket technology, mix them together and they go boom.

“It’s one of the favorite booby traps the Galra like to leave behind when they have to drop a ship. We go in, we stir the environment, the droplets mix, and the explosions chain reaction through the ship. They’ve probably also sabotaged the most delicate engine systems to make the explosion bigger. We die, our ship gets destroyed, and there’s one less Coalition vessel they have to worry about.”

“ _So we just leave the cruiser here?_ ” Steuber asked. “ _Mark it off as dangerous in case anybody comes after us?_ ”

“No, we need to see what’s in here,” Curtis answered, following the two soldiers out the open airlock and drifting a few yards away from the Cruiser. “This ship is marked with Sendak’s sigil, and somebody went through a lot of trouble to hide it here in this asteroid. They intended to come back and made sure whatever’s on here would be destroyed if they didn’t.”

“ _Blow out and drain, Captain_?” A woman’s voice joined in, Commander Sterling. She was his second in command, and was back just inside the airlock of their own ship.

“Blow out and drain,” Curtis confirmed. “Everyone back to the Themis. Sterling, send your team in.”

He used his boosters to move back over to the open airlock of the Themis, the human-crewed frigate stationed deep in Galra-held space. As he and the other two members of his current landing party returned, six more soldiers from the one-hundred-twenty member crew were dispatched over to the Galra ship.

It would take a little while for them to be ready, about twenty minutes if patterns held, which gave him a little bit of time to prepare. Sterling was waiting for him when he stepped back into gravity, falling into step beside him as he pulled off his helmet and headed for the bridge.

“Six months?” He asked when they were alone and he no longer had to hide his displeasure. “We’re out in the middle of dead space with enemies in literally every direction, and the powers that be decided it was a good idea to send us somebody barely out of basic training?”

“He’s good with computers,” Sterling answered. “Besides, you signed off on his transfer.”

“You said you vetted him,” Curtis reminded her. “I was in the middle of planning this mission, I trusted your judgement.”

“And I judged he was worth the risk. Like I said, he’s good with computers…and he can’t learn if he doesn’t get the chance.”

“I don’t care about him learning, I care about him surviving,” Curtis returned. “The Galra have killed enough of us already, but it’s always a bigger tragedy when it’s someone young. At least the rest of us are old and broken.”

“Says the thirty-five-year-old,” Sterling said primly, raising her tablet to look at it. “By the way, you have a call. It’s your ex-husband.”

“Of course it is.”

The Themis was a special forces ship, its whereabouts and missions were known only to a trusted few and only so necessary communications could be made, for the most part Curtis and his crew were on their own and all decisions fell on him. He made the calls back to Earth, not the other way around. The only reason anybody should have been calling his ship was if they had immediate Galra transmissions indicating the Themis had been spotted and was in danger, other than that they were ghosts.

Unless you were the former Captain of the IGF Atlas and an ex-Paladin, in which case everyone bent over backwards to give you what you wanted. Including access to a top secret communications line.

“Put him on hold until he hangs up,” Curtis told her.

“I did. He’s been waiting for the last half hour, he won’t cut the line.”

“Ugh, fine. I’ll take it in my quarters.”

He broke away from her at the end of the hall, stepping into the elevator alone. The control panel read his handprint and took him up, to the topmost deck where only he had access.

It wasn’t a luxury as much as a necessity, the place where high level information was kept on its own separate server that didn’t connect to anything else. It also had high security weapons that weren’t for standard usage, and the space he needed to generally plan and prepare for each day’s new dangers to his crew.

His quarters were not there for space or comfort, though they were slightly bigger than the other crew members’. They were there because he didn’t have off hours, and the small control room nearby functioned as a secondary bridge console in the case of emergency.

He let himself in, tossing his helmet onto the uncomfortable bed on his way past it to the small door that led to this secondary console. Dropping into the chair, he pulled up the Themis’ communication channels and opened the occupied one. Sure enough, he was met with a view of a familiar scar and snow white hair.

“This is an emergency only line. What do you want?” He asked bluntly. “I’m working.”

“I see you’re okay,” Shiro answered, turning away from whatever he was doing to face the feed. “Iverson said the last time you’d called in was three months ago. I was worried.”

“Yes, it’s a six-month deployment,” Curtis answered, trying not to sound as cranky as he felt. “They’re not supposed to hear from me. You know that, you know how this works.”

“Your deployments only used to be three months,” Shiro replied. “And you’ve always called in at least once a month.”

“Because I was married,” Curtis said logically. “Now I’m not. I’m not going to call home if there’s nobody at home to call.”

It had been a point of argument during all four years of their short marriage that Shiro had retired from the military and Curtis hadn’t. Shiro hadn’t wanted to, he was basically on lockdown by the Garrison, and in the beginning he had been very encouraging. But as time wore on and Curtis spent his deployments fighting the war, Shiro had slowly become resentful that he was stuck at home.

Princess Allura had died, presumably taking Honerva with her, and had restored Altea and Daibazaal. The Lions of Voltron had disappeared, assumed to have been alchemically programmed to hide or destroy themselves once the woman who had rightfully inherited them was gone. The Atlas, no longer needed to berth the Lions, had been broken down to build smaller battleships.

And in the space beyond Earth’s safe little bubble, war continued to rage.

It took more than reintroducing a planet to bring an unstable, universe-wide empire down and make the galaxies safe. Once the Blade of Marmora had been converted into an aid organization and lost its edge as an intelligence force, separatists had been able to rise and splinter off again.

The Paladins no longer had Lions, and the Garrison was tossing them soft responsibilities to keep from putting them in combat. The Coalition had swiftly been taken over by bureaucrats once Voltron was gone, they were consolidating power and keeping it by pretending there was no war going on. The celebrity status of Shiro and the kids meant they were very visible, and they had to appear to be living quiet, everyday lives to keep civilians in the dark about what was actually going on.

In fact, of them all, Shiro was the only one who wasn’t personally in the dark himself. None of the ex-Paladins knew what was going on beyond Coalition borders. None of them were aware that the war was only just heating up now that Voltron’s disappearance had emboldened some of the factions the empire had broken into before the war.

Very little had changed. They were just made to think it had.

“I know that feeling of nobody being home,” Shiro answered coolly. “I got used to that years ago.”

“Well go fix it, then,” Curtis advised, matching his tone. “That was why you demanded full ownership of the house in the proceedings. What did you tell the judge? Because you would probably start a family and need the space after the “cold, soulless asshole” was out of the picture.”

Shiro being stuck at home against his will had put a strain on their relationship to begin with, but the biggest point of contention toward the end had been this one. Shiro had been ready to introduce a baby into the picture, Curtis absolutely had not.

“You had just called me a condescending jackass!” Shiro defended. “Was I supposed to let that slide?”

“You were _being_ a condescending jackass!”

“Know what? Fine. From now on that’s how I’m signing your alimony checks. “Condescending Jackass.”

“We use the same bank, and the tellers have met you. Don’t worry, they’ll know exactly who signed it,” Curtis returned.

“And your sisters have called me three times in the last month alone asking if I’d heard from you because you fell off the map, so I’m pretty sure your family will back me up on my soulless asshole comment.”

“Yeah, well, my family likes you better than me,” Curtis answered, slouching down in his chair. He braced an elbow on the armrest and rested his chin on one hand, rubbing his eyes with the other. “Tell them I’m fine. Everything’s been really uneventful, just a bunch of search and salvage.”

“When was the last time you slept, Curt?” Shiro asked, dropping pretenses and becoming serious. The initial divorce itself had been nasty, but a bit of time and space had soothed them both. “You have circles under your eyes.”

“You know how it gets out here.”

“I do, that’s why I’m concerned.”

Being apart for a year clearly didn’t mean Shiro had magically stopped knowing him as well as he did. He was no stranger to the stresses of deep space missions, and after spending plenty of nights too paranoid to sleep while out with the Paladins he knew the signs of somebody who was under strain. Particularly Curtis, who he had always been able to tell was tired even before it started to show.

“Between you and me? I’m exhausted,” Curtis admitted. “I hate being a Captain. It was one thing when my job meant sneaking into enemy territory on Earth, at least there were always locals to blend in with. Out here it’s just nothing, if you’re spotted you’re dead. I’m responsible for a hundred and twenty lives, and every time the stupid motion alarm goes off I’m on my toes even after we find out it’s just a damn comet or something. I don’t know how you did this for so long with the Atlas.”

“I had help,” Shiro answered, resting his chin on one hand as well. “I had you right there next to me. I had Coran, and Sam, and Matt. Even Slav. Keith, Katie, Hunk, Lance. James, Nadia, Ryan, Ina. You just have you. It takes a very strong man to be in your position, I don’t blame you for being tired.”

“If I was still on three-month deployments I’d be getting ready to pack up and go home right now,” Curtis said wistfully. “But now I have three more months of this. It’s getting more interesting the deeper into enemy space we go, though. We recently found something that might interest you, actually. One of Sendak’s ships is out here hidden in the cavity of an asteroid.”

“Sendak’s?” Shiro looked surprised. “I thought all of his ships were taken down and crashed here on Earth. Isn’t yours built from some of the wreckage?”

“This frigate is barely a fraction of the size of a cruiser,” Curtis answered. “Most of the salvage-built ships are small, just because we got enough scrap to build an armada doesn’t mean we got all of them. This one doesn’t look like a standard cruiser, either. It’s a little bit smaller, and it’s wired to blow.”

“Fuel and oxidizer?” Shiro guessed. “Are you prepping a blow out and drain?”

“I have a team getting it ready now,” Curtis confirmed. “It was hidden pretty well, whoever was manning it definitely didn’t want it found.”

“ _Excuse me, sir,_ ” Sterling’s voice cut in over the comm, filtering through as her image came up on another screen. “ _The prep team found something you might want to see_.”

“Bring it up,” Curtis requested, motioning for Shiro to give him a moment.

Sterling’s face disappeared as the video cut to another angle, showing the point of view of one of the soldiers out by the ship. The lights they held did little to chase away the cold darkness of space, especially with the cavernous space within the asteroid blocking any ambient light from stars.

The monstrous hull of the dead ship loomed closer in the video, and the lights washed over its black surface to reveal a symbol other than Sendak’s painted in red. Curtis looked at it as the soldier backed up a little to give a better view, dropping the pen he’d picked up in shock.

“Na' uzobillah,” he whispered, scrambling for his headset and punching in a call to the bridge. “Steuber, are you recording this?”

“ _Absolutely, sir._ ”

“I’m patching in Admiral Iverson and going back down to the docking bay,” Curtis informed everybody, typing in his code to unlock the outgoing communications. “Takashi, stay on the line. You’re going to want to see this.”

* * * * *

Curtis stood down in the loading dock of the Themis, between the inner and outer airlock doors with Sterling. His helmet was back on, leaving him unable to see video of Admiral Iverson and Shiro but able to hear them both on the line. From here, though, he could just see the far side of the Galra cruiser in the redirected light of his own ship.

“It’s not a mistake,” he declared, folding his arms. “That’s Honerva’s mark. That’s why this ship looks different from other cruisers, she probably had to take her lab and run once she was working with Sendak and didn’t have access to Galra Central Command anymore.”

“That ship just got about fifty times more dangerous,” Shiro warned. “Mitch, I think they should just leave it be.”

“I’m just as capable as you are, Takashi,” Curtis chided before Iverson could respond. “This is my job, stop trying to protect me and let me do it.”

“I agree,” Iverson answered after a short pause for consideration. “The Themis crew is comprised of some of our best and brightest, we wouldn’t trust them to be infiltrating enemy lines otherwise. Besides, if this ship was Haggar’s we need to see what’s on it. The last thing we want is an enemy Galra faction stumbling upon it if it has anything dangerous to us on it.”

“You’re right, of course,” Shiro gave in, but didn’t sound happy about it.

“Initiate the blow out,” Iverson ordered.

“Initiating blow out,” Curtis confirmed, turning and motioning to the soldiers back behind him in the dock.

The Themis’ particle barrier was raised to protect it from the what might come next, and then a moment later controlled explosions began occurring around the airlock of the cruiser. They were small, tiny charges laid out very precisely, effectively carving off the airlock itself and leaving a hole in its place. A chain attached to its handle was used to pull it away and then a second device was detonated just outside the opening.

It was a modified gravity generator, based on the systems used to create artificial gravity on space ships. It could be controlled from here on the Themis, and as Curtis held his breath he watched he light go from red to green as it was activated. The soldiers in charge of it watched it carefully, gently adjusting the gravity until small droplets of clear liquid began to be pulled out of the ship toward it.

Nothing else rushed out of the hole, meaning that the readings were correct and there had been no air on the ship.

The gravitational register was being watched very carefully in an attempt to keep a steady pull so all the drops moved at the same pace. Most of them did so until they hit the smaller particle barrier around the device, where they began mixing and exploding. Curtis winced at the light, his eyes glued to the opening in the cruisers hull.

They did not want anything to explode too far inside. Every ignition that happened around the opening made Curtis’ heart skip a beat as he waited to see if it would spark a chain reaction.

The full drain took almost two hours. A section would be cleared, then the device would be sent in further and then work like a magnet, being moved to slowly pull everything out. Several explosions did occur inside the ship, but thankfully they all happened in its docking bay and there didn’t seem to be anything there to damage. The trap also didn’t seem to go any farther into the ship than a few yards down each exit hall from the docking bay.

This ship had been ditched in a hurry.

“Search team alpha, head to the bridge of this thing,” Curtis ordered over his comm. “Beta, head to the engine room. Gamma, hit the medical bay and see if we have anybody in cryo there. The rest of you with me, take up position in the loading dock and wait for further orders.”

“You’re going in there?” Shiro asked over the private line. “Curt, that’s what you have soldiers for. You should be safely on your bridge.”

“My job is a little bit different than yours was,” Curtis answered, activating his boosters as the Themis airlock opened and propelling himself along the side of the cruiser toward the opening. “Aren’t you glad you weren’t allowed to know that this was the kind of thing I did while we were married?”

“I almost wish I didn’t know this was the kind of thing you did now,” Shiro answered. “ _Please_ be careful.”

“I’ll be as careful as I always am.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

The look on Curtis’ face was lost on Shiro, who couldn’t see him without the video feed. He switched the Earth communication line over to secondary, concentrating instead on what his people were saying.

Sterling came to join him and the two followed the waiting team, drifting into the yawning darkness of the open hole in the cruiser hull. It reminded Curtis of those old horror and suspense movies, the ones where the crew of a small vessel found a giant ship floating in space with no sign of the crew, nothing but silent darkness stretching out as far as he could see. The small circles of light cast by their flashlights danced around the giant bay but found no signs of strikers or supply crates.

This ship had been stripped bare when its occupants had gone. Or, the more likely scenario, it had been stripped bare before Honerva had killed and disposed of the crew to keep whatever she had here private.

“Are the scanners functioning yet?” Curtis asked, pushing off the wall to float unhindered out into the dark. He was familiar enough with these cruisers to know what was in front of him even if he couldn’t see it yet. “Or is the asteroid still messing with them even in here?”

“The asteroid is still messing with them,” Sterling answered. “Its ore doesn’t have a field strong enough to disrupt communications, but it’s wrecking all the scanner frequencies. We tried all of them.”

“All right. All teams, proceed with extreme caution,” Curtis ordered. “We have no way of scanning for life signs until this ship’s power is back online. Honerva was fond of creating mutations, she could have something in cryo here programmed to wake up if any intruders came aboard.”

The team leaders all copied that, and Curtis went back to his inspection.

There wasn’t much to look at in an empty hold, all he could really do was float around listlessly and respond to the different teams’ concerns as they were raised. He had thirty people moving through a ship only a little smaller than a standard Galra cruiser, a ship built to hold thousands of soldiers and officers, and much of it had to be done slowly since elevators and automatic doors weren’t working.

It was a little over two hours into the wait when he finally got some good news.

“ _All right, the balmera crystal is still functional,_ ” one of his engineers announced from down in the engine room. “ _Powering up the ship in five…four…three…two…_ ”

Curtis flipped the shader on his helmet down as the lights flared on in the hold. As they’d already figured out from their wait there was nothing here to see, but at least now he could see it all at once instead of in tiny pools of light. There was nothing that wasn’t standard about the hold, nothing any more nefarious than any other Galra ship.

“ _Gravity simulators powering on,_ ” the engineer warned about ten minutes later. “ _Downward gravitational field in five…four…three…two…_ ”

Curtis positioned himself right side up along with the rest of his people, using his boosters to drift himself down closer to the floor. As the gravity came on they landed neatly on their feet.

“ _Patching the docking hole,_ ” another engineer announced. Curtis watched as a pearlescent shimmer ran across the opening where they’d blown away the airlock. Most large vessels had this safety backup, a temporary shielding system that patched the holes until the ship could dock and repair hull breaches. “ _Activating life support._ ”

The empty halls of the ship shuddered with the sudden force of air being circulated through the high-powered recycling system, breathable air rushing through the ship and filling the formerly empty vacuum at high speed. The system was meant to work this quickly, just like the breach patch. In the event that something happened where the inner atmosphere was compromised, oxygen had to be replaced quickly to avoid losing the crew.

“ _Sir, I hope I’m not stepping out of line, but I took the liberty of writing up a quick connection code to get around the cruiser’s server security and piggyback on the shipwide scanners,_ ” Steuber’s voice came over the line from where he was waiting on the bridge.

Curtis had removed his helmet once his suit read that the environment was survivable and was in the process of adjusting his earpiece. He stopped, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m sorry, you did what?”

“ _I wrote up a connection code to get—_ ”

“No, I heard you, that wasn’t an actual question,” Curtis sighed, putting his thumb over the mic on his collar and looking over at Sterling. “He broke through the security on a non-standard Galra cruiser in the barely twenty minutes since the server came online?”

“I told you,” Sterling had removed her own helmet and was smoothing down her short, brunette bob. “He’s good with computers.”

“No, I’m good with computers,” Curtis answered. “This kid is unbelievable.”

“I won’t tell him you said that, sir.”

“Thank you.” Curtis opened his mic back up. “Did you find anything on the scan, Ensign?”

“ _Yes, sir. There are life signs on that ship, and a lot of them. But they’re not in the medical area where they’d usually be, they look like they’re in a storage bay a deck below you._ ”

“How many?”

“ _Approximately three hundred. Looks like they’re all asleep._ ”

That was a lot of life signs. Twice the number of soldiers he had on the Themis, six times the number he’d actually brought onto the cruiser. Barely a drop in the bucket compared to what this vessel could hold, but still more than they could handle if they accidentally tripped the wake up order and it came down to a fight.

“Should we wait for the others to finish checking out the bridge and medical bay?” Sterling asked.

“No,” Curtis decided. “We’ll split the waiting party in half. I’ll take nine and go down, you stay here with nine in case any of the others need help. A smaller group is less likely to set off any traps.”

He quickly picked out nine of the waiting soldiers and led them to the now-functioning elevator across the huge docking bay, knowing Shiro was probably losing his mind as he listened in right now. There had always been an awareness there that what Curtis did for a living was dangerous, Shiro was an experienced soldier and under no illusions, but listening to it live and having no input was likely driving him up a wall.

“Guns at ready,” Curtis ordered as they piled into the lift. He pulled up the readouts Steuber was sending him, watching for any signs of a power surge that indicated someone might be waking up. “I need four on point, two bringing up the rear.”

The soldiers were all well trained and they moved like a well-oiled machine. Two crouched down in front by the elevator doors, two more readied their guns to potentially provide cover fire. Two fell all the way to the back to also provide cover. Curtis unshouldered his own rifle, and as the elevator doors open he poured out with the others. When two of the remaining soldiers moved left to cover their flank, he moved right with the remaining woman to cover that side.

Everything was silent. The team moved like ghosts, the four soldiers on point leapfrogging two over two, the first pair moving ahead several yards before motioning that everything was clear and the pair behind them could go. Curtis kept his eyes in front of him and ignored everything else, trusting his people to know what they were doing as they moved through the cavernous hold lined with strange-looking cylinders. His trained gaze swept everything, from the shadows those pods cast to the spaces behind storage crates to the catwalks above.

They moved in complete silence until they reached the end of the hold, having found nothing moving. Curtis motioned for the two currently on point to go up the nearby staircase to the control booth, waiting patiently below with the others.

“All clear,” one reappeared a moment later to announce. “The system doesn’t have any traps set. But you’re going to want to see this.”

Curtis left the others downstairs and went up to the control booth, where the second soldier had the console booted up thanks to Steuber having dismantled all of the ship’s security measures. He didn’t have to ask what they wanted him to look at, all these years in this job had left him pretty fluent in both spoken and written Galra. The word on the middle of the screen leapt out at him, despite being surrounded by the rest of the map of the hold.

Human.

A section of the pods was labeled as human, about thirty of them. There were others, a section of Olkari and one of Galra and one of Puig, along with several others, but it was the human one that stood out. Curtis leaned over the soldier at the console and tapped one of the pod images, bringing up the profile.

SPECIES: HUMAN  
SEX: FEMALE  
AGE: APPROXIMATELY 27 DECAPHOEBS  
ACQUISITION: 856.21.314  
STATUS: STAGE TWO

Curtis did a quick calculation, converting decaphoebs to years and the Universal date to Earth time.

“She’s almost twenty-six,” he said. “She was taken about three months after the invasion. Sent to Honerva from a work camp, maybe?”

“Probably,” the soldier agreed. He reached up and swiped through the profiles. “These dates look like Honerva got a new handful of humans every couple of months. I get everything but the stages. Stage two, stage four. What does that mean?”

Having lived through the invasion and occupation, and knowing what he did about Honerva and tyrants in general, Curtis had an idea what they meant. But he wasn’t sure yet. The soldier kept swiping, but Curtis reached over to grab his hand and stop him when something on one caught his eye.

ACQUISITION: 856.21.308  
STATUS: CONTROL

They were back at the beginning of the Human section. He moved to the next.

ACQUISITION: 856.21.308  
STATUS: CONTROL

The next, and the next. Acquired on 856.21.308, status: control group.

Curtis shoved away from the console to bolt out of the booth and down the stairs.

He sprinted past the rest of the soldiers, who knew better than to stand around. They ran after him as he headed for the section on the map, slowing to a stop when he reached the point where the labels over the tubes changed from “Olkari” to “Human.” These pods weren’t the same as the Altean ones they all used now but the interface was similar.

“Sir?” One of the women asked as he started working through the commands, trying to find the one he wanted. “What’s going on?”

“Admiral Iverson?” Curtis switched the secondary comm line over so the listeners were unmuted. “Shiro? Still there?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m shutting down your connection,” he said brusquely. “This just became need-to-know.”

“Wait, you can’t just cut me off now,” Shiro protested.

“Admiral, please prep for an unscheduled arrival,” Curtis advised, ignoring him. “Tertiary base. I’m applying in-person-only protocols to this, meet me there in six hours for a briefing. We’re going to wormhole this whole cruiser into quarantined space.”

“You have a teludav on your ship?” Shiro was still trying to ask questions.

“Special forces ships wouldn’t be able to go that deep into enemy territory if they didn’t have a quick getaway,” Iverson answered him calmly. “Ending communications. I’ll see you in six hours, Captain.”

“Wait, what the hell is going o—”

Curtis killed their connections, ending the communications with Earth entirely. He motioned for the rest of his men in the room to kill their own comm lines and go dead for a moment.

“These four humans were taken the day of the invasion,” Curtis finally answered the soldier who’d questioned him, swiping through the options. “But the Galra didn’t disembark their ships to start taking civilians from the rubble until a week later, they waited for survivors to be weak from hunger and thirst. The only humans they had access to before then were the ones we gave them.”

He found what he was looking for and activated the feature. A soft light went on inside the tube, illuminating the sleeping form of a woman in her late twenties. She was wearing a Galaxy Garrison fighter pilot uniform.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Lieutenant Catelyn Peters,” Curtis announced, moving on to the next pod. He lit them one by one, recognizing each face as they became visible. “Captain Ahn Chen. Lieutenant Ekene Jelani. Captain Adam Wolfe.”

He was careful not to give any indication any of these people meant anything to him, despite the fact that he was looking at the sleeping faces of old friends. He was still on a mission, and he couldn’t afford to let emotion take precedence over logic and common sense.

Curtis especially didn’t want to react to the last one. It was hard enough going through a marriage knowing some of the rough patches were because your husband missed a ghost, but having that ghost loom up large and alive was a roller coaster of its own.

“All four were declared dead without recovering their bodies or planes,” he told the others. “It was assumed they were lost in the mountains their dogfight happened over. Between the four of them there’s a lot of scar tissue, I’m guessing that all the Garrison planes were shot out of the sky but the ones that weren’t blown completely to pieces were taken aboard with the attacking ship’s docking beam. They patched them up a little bit and sent them here.”

“Do we need to quarantine pilots?” Another soldier asked. “They’re still wearing their bloody uniforms, I don’t think they’ve even been awake a day since they were put in here.”

“It’s not the pilots I’m worried about, they’re a control group,” Curtis answered, backing away down the line. He looked for the pod number for one of the profiles he’d seen in the control booth, stopping when he found it. “I’m worried about this.”

To be perfectly honest, he didn’t know what he was going to see when he turned on the light. He prepared himself for the worst, and as the occupant became visible he wasn’t disappointed. Misshapen, mutated, barely identifiable as human, the contents of the tube was like something out of a nightmare. His ominous thoughts earlier, about horror movies involving ghost ships, were turning out to be prescient.

“Whatever she was working on here, this is stage four,” he choked out, turning away. “We absolutely can’t leave this here for the Galra to find, and it needs to be quarantined as soon as possible.”

There were no arguments. Time was now officially of the essence, this was no longer just some supply ship they could ditch and run if the enemy found them. They needed to get this hulking titan moving, it needed to be transported back into friendly space where the extent of the danger could truly be discerned.

“Everyone reactivate your comms,” Curtis ordered. Everyone already knew what had to be done, but he went over the list anyway. “Seal this deck. Nobody in, nobody out. I highly doubt any of us have come into contact with any pathogens, but protocol is protocol…Sterling?”

“ _Here, sir._ ”

“We have a quarantine situation, we’re sealing the deck.”

“ _Is emergency medical attention necessary_?”

“No, I don’t think so. But even so, evacuate everyone but a five-person bridge crew and a five-person engineering crew. Make sure everyone leaving the cruiser goes through a scrub, just in case. Have Tamille open a wormhole to our tertiary fallback. We’re going to keep taking a look down here, you’re in command.”

“ _Yes, sir._ ”

He turned to the others, motioning around the deck.

“Helmets on, scout it out,” he ordered. “Keep at least five feet away from the pods at all times. I want a preliminary sight check just to be sure nothing’s ruptured and contaminated the area.”

It was scary, knowing what could be lurking in the air they were breathing. So far all they had was a quick glimpse of the system’s inner workings, they didn’t know how long this thing’s incubation period was or how long each stage lasted. They didn’t know if there was a treatment, or if those who were so far along were terminal.

Curtis left his helmet off as the soldiers dispersed, heading back toward the control booth. As scary as it was, he really didn’t think they’d been exposed to anything. Honerva was crazy but she wasn’t stupid, there would be so many safety precautions in place it was probably impossible to even catch a cold here. She wanted targeted, controlled destruction, not something that could potentially turn around and bite her in the ass.

A second, longer look at the control booth console confirmed his assumption. He scanned the air in the room for biohazards and found none, ran a safety check on the capsules and found no reported breaches. All occupants were in cryo, which meant everything in their systems down to the germs were frozen and temporarily lifeless. Provided they didn’t get attacked and have anything rupture, they were all completely safe.

He locked down the deck and pulled up the cruiser’s scanners, checking to see if there were any other surprises on this ship that needed to be located and sealed.

There were no other life signs on any other decks, except for the teams milling about the ship. Five were on the bridge, five were in Engineering, and the others were moving toward the loading dock exit to evacuate. He and his nine crew were the only things moving down on this deck, mixed in among the many other faint life sighs of the frozen lab rats.

But there was something of interest, which a cursory look hadn’t shown. Most of the life signs were concentrated in this lab, but there were a small number of them in an adjacent chamber. There was no further information on this room, it seemed like it was completely on its own server and was just a blank spot in the ship databanks.

Curtis needed to know what was in there, if it constituted a threat. It looked like five more cryo-sealed subjects, but if they were something serious like disease incubators he needed to be able to tell the quarantine team that.

He left the control booth and followed along the wall, making his way toward a far corner of the huge room until he found the door he was looking for. It wasn’t locked with any special codes, but that was probably because Honerva hadn’t expected anyone but herself to ever be in here in the first place.

The first thing Curtis noted when he stepped inside was that it was dark, the second was that it was cold. The refrigeration had probably kicked into overdrive in here when the life support systems came back on, which wouldn’t be unusual if this was a room normally used to store biological samples. He found the light control and flipped it on, and found himself faced with five very different pods than the ones out in the main room.

They were set into the wall and much wider, and had no numbers or identifying features. There were no individual control panels either, these were controlled by the central console on the far wall. Curtis slowly moved closer, getting a better look inside.

The reason they were different was immediately apparent. The people in these pods were of all different species, he could tell from their size and build. But they also weren’t test subjects, since as far as Curtis knew nobody would outfit test subjects in high grade armor. Nor would they put test subjects into cryo armed, and the weapons on these people were clearly visible in the pods.

The tactical armor was black, marked on the chest with the red sigil of the Galra empire, and covered them from top to bottom. Even their heads were covered with masks that went overtheir noses and mouths, with dark shaders that hid their eyes from view. These people were ready to fight at a moment’s notice, their suits looked like they were prepared to step right out of the pods and out into open space if necessary.

These weren’t biological test subjects, but if Curtis had to guess he’d say they were living weapons. Some of the things they wore didn’t even look like they had any practical purpose in fighting and were likely some form of physical restraint. Honerva had probably controlled these people, whether with her magic or through mechanisms in these suits.

He crossed the room to the console and started it up, watching the readouts come up on the screen. Basic boot lines that showed up whenever a computer started, and then it came to the home screen for the pods that confirmed Curtis’ assumption with bone-chilling clarity.

KURON PROJECT: END STAGE SUBJECTS

POD 42G: GALRA  
POD 43P: PUIG  
POD 44H: HUMAN  
POD 45D: DARKLASSIAN  
POD 46T: TAURELAE

Curtis looked back at the ominous forms in the pods. Every part of him, logical and emotional, was screaming for him to get out of there and seal the door. He knew that project name, he’d been up close and personal with one of the subjects for years, and he knew better than anyone except Shiro what they were capable of.

But as frightening as it was, he also had a duty. Curtis forced himself to turn back to the console and pull the small drive out of his glove, hooking it into the computer and downloading the project contents. It took about twenty mind-numbing minutes, and when he was done he began reformatting the computer and destroying all the original documents.

This was on a clearance level very few people had, and the team who would be doing the quarantine check when this ship was brought in weren’t high enough on the food chain to see it. He needed to make sure there was nothing here for them to find, just in case he didn’t seal the door well enough and they got in here.

“ _All crew of he ICS Themis, prepare for wormhole travel,_ ” Sterling’s voice came over the comm. “ _Galra vessel and Themis will be jumping in approximately five minutes_.”

Curtis tucked the drive back into his glove and started to leave the room. He was halfway to the door when his curiosity got the better of him and he slowed down, veering instead to stand in front of the middle pod. Number 44H, the one the computer said held a human subject.

He didn’t want to admit that he knew what was in here. The armor and mask made it easy to pretend there was nothing human there, that it was some kind of robeast or machine built from spare parts. But the height, the build, even the way the weapon belts were slung, all told a different story.

Curtis reached up and slowly ran his hand across the glass, clearing away the thin layer of frost that was beginning to form on the surface. He searched the mask for some familiar feature, anything that would make it seem less alien, but there wasn’t anything. The thing in here had been made for one reason and one reason only: kill whatever Honerva aimed it at.

His preoccupation with the contents of the pod was broken when he realized the glass around his fingertips was beginning to turn pink. Thermal glass, intended to sense when someone was tampering, so rarely used he’d never actually seen it himself and had only heard of it.

Curtis yanked his hand away but it was too late. Text began running across the surface of the glass, the lighting inside of it starting to dim to allow the person inside to see out into the room easier.

UNAUTHORIZED CONTACT DETECTED  
FINGERPRINT SCAN: NO MATCH FOUND  
INITIATING DEFENSE PROTOCOLS_

The soft “whoosh” of the pod opening was the only other warning he got, and Curtis was already moving when he heard it. He sprinted across the smaller lab and threw himself behind a shelf of unidentifiable boxes, crouching down and holding his breath.

The man inside the pod stepped out but didn’t move at first, as if waiting for some kind of commands. When none came he finally looked around, somehow managing to appear confused even though he was barely visible under all the armor and weaponry. He walked slowly along the line of pods and back, heavy booted feet making his footsteps echo forebodingly through the small space.

He stopped again in front of his own pod and Curtis carefully peeked around the edge of the shelf, sizing up his chances of escape. The lab was long and narrow and the door was closed, so even though he was fast he knew he couldn’t get out under these conditions. He needed a clear path, if he could run it and aimed right he could slam into the control panel to open the door without slowing down, spin around the doors as they opened, and hit the panel on the other side to close them again before he was caught. He might end up catching this guy in the door, but at least he’d be through and out himself.

“ _Galra vessel is leaving the asteroid. One minute to jump_.”

The man was pulling at the sides of his mask, trying to get it off, but he stopped when Sterling’s voice came from Curtis’ comm and broke the silence. He looked across the room and Curtis quickly pulled back, flattening himself against the shelf.

He could have sworn he was seen, but as the seconds ticked by he didn’t hear the man move and he didn’t appear. Carefully, Curtis slowly leaned out to look again.

There was no one. A sound did come then, a small “clack” noise from the far end of the lab, where the man must have gone to search. Curtis eased out of his hiding place, his eyes glued on the shelves in the back, watching for any sign of the soldier as he carefully backed toward the door.

Too late he saw the small knife on the floor over by the desk, where there had been nothing before. Too late, he realized he’d been stupid enough to fall for a very simple trick, that the item had been tossed to make a distracting sound.

Curtis turned to dart for the door but he found his way blocked by the armored man. A hand grabbed his throat and he was thrown back against the now-closed pod, held there with his toes just barely touching the ground as he gasped for air.

“Where’s Haggar?”

The soldier’s voice was distorted by the mask, mechanical and harsh.

“Gone,” Curtis choked out.

“Where?”

“Just…just gone. Dead.”

He didn’t know if that was the right thing to say or the wrong one. For a moment the soldier didn’t seem to know either, but he recovered quickly. He lowered Curtis enough that he could at least stand steadily on his toes and breathe a bit easier.

“You’re lying. Is this another killing game? You come in here, talk about the war being over, then shit goes down as soon as we step out of this room? Your armor looks Galra, I’m not stupid. What faction are you from? And how much did they pay you to turn on your own planet?”

“This is special tactics armor,” Curtis answered. It would be stupid to try and play off that he wasn’t from Earth, so he didn’t try. But he didn’t have to say anything about the Coalition. “It was designed for my team based on Galra deep space armor, it’s completely Earth-made and Galaxy Garrison-issued.”

“Your team.” It was a statement rather than a question, echoing the term back to him as if a verbal confirmation that he now knew there were others on the ship.

He moved over to the console, dragging Curtis with him, and Curtis held his breath. But the soldier was completely uninterested in anything that might have been on the hard drive, using his free hand to bring up the cruiser’s video and sensor systems. He flipped through different cameras until the Themis came into view.

“That ship looks awfully Galran in design to me,” he noted.

“It was built from wreckage of a Galra ship that crashed on Earth,” Curtis insisted. “After they were overthrown and the occupation ended.”

“Earth doesn’t have the weaponry to overthrow the Galra.” The cameras flicked through views again until they stopped on the wormhole the ship was headed toward. “Hm.”

“That wormhole is taking us into Garrison space,” Curtis admitted. This guy didn’t seem terribly sad to hear Honerva might be gone, and he had hope that without her around to control him the soldier would calm down and not be a threat. “It wasn’t opened by Honerva, we have an Altean crew member—”

“There are no Alteans except Princess Allura,” the soldier cut him off. “And she’s been missing along with the rest of her team for years.”

Missing for years. How long had he been floating here in cryo? It had to have been since before the Paladins got out of the time dilation and word spread that they were back, but after the occupation had started since he didn’t seem surprised. But that would mean that this soldier had been frozen asleep for around ten years.

“Okay, you’re probably not going to believe this, but there’s a whole planet of them,” Curtis tried. “Altea has a joint military venture with Earth—”

“Shut up.” The soldier’s grip tightened around Curtis’ neck as he slammed the computer to exit the viewing screens. He wasn’t buying any of what Curtis was selling even if it was the truth, and honestly he couldn’t blame him. The reality of the last ten years was like some kind of badly written tv-show, he wouldn’t have believed it either.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, bringing up a control prompt. Curtis knew a little bit about Galra programming, not much, but when he saw the other four pods beginning to fill with liquid he knew the soldier must have activated a system designed to kill and dispose of the subjects.

Cold-blooded as hell.

The ship started to shake a bit as it began to move into the wormhole, and the soldier looked around seemingly in frustration. He dropped Curtis and pulled off his rifle, throwing it across the lab before slamming him against the wall again and doing a quick check for further weapons. His pistol and knife followed his rifle, along with his comm link and mic, and then he was shoved away.

“Walk,” the soldier commanded, drawing one of his own guns. He used it to motion to the back of the lab, to the shelves where Curtis had initially thought he’d gone.

Raising his hands slowly, Curtis did as he was told. He looked around for something, anything, that he could use to defend himself, but there were just too many weapons at the soldier’s disposal. He was sure he was about to be shot and left here, but when they got to the back of the lab the soldier shoved two of the shelves out of the way and pressed his hand to a control pad to open the door into a small, secret lift.

“In.”

“Where are we going?”

Curtis jumped as the soldier fired his gun at the floor, barely a centimeter from putting a laserfire hole right through his foot.

“You might be going straight to whatever hell is reserved for traitors and sell swords if you don’t move your ass.”

Curtis pursed his lips and stepped into the lift. Before he could turn around his hands were grabbed and pulled behind his back, and he felt restraints slapped on them. He didn’t protest.

The soldier hit the panel again and Curtis felt like he’d been dropped into freefall. The lift moved quickly, very quickly, built to deliver the Kuron soldiers into a fight just as fast as the pods were. Before he could even get his bearings the door was opening again and they were stepping out into a small hangar that had five Galra strikers.

“You can’t use those, we’re probably just going fully into the wormhole now,” Curtis warned. “You leave this ship, God only knows what will happen.”

“You fall through the wormhole wall and either get crushed into oblivion by the intense gravity of the infinite mass that caused it or you drop out somewhere along the way,” the soldier said casually. “Been there, done that. But keep talking and I’m going to drop you unprotected out into the wormhole.”

“Aren’t you planning on dropping me somewhere out in space to die anyway?” Curtis asked, raising an eyebrow. He wasn’t stupid, the soldier was only bringing him along so he couldn’t raise the alarm. He didn’t actually have a use for him, and he clearly believed Curtis was an enemy combatant.

“Yes.”

“Then why would I shut up?”

The soldier was trying to move quickly to activate one of the strikers, but Curtis could see he was slower that he might normally have been. He was confused, he was wary, he didn’t really know what was going on. He clearly didn’t trust Curtis, but he was also completely thrown off. And he was quickly becoming frustrated.

“You promise not to kill me until I have a chance to prove what I’m telling you is true, and I’ll be quiet and let you get out of here without being distracted.”

The soldier let out a breath through his nose, the sound just as mechanical and grinding as the mask made his voice. He leaned against the striker for a moment, absently pulling at the fastenings that locked the mask into place.

“Or I could start singing one of the most annoying songs you’ve ever heard in your life, you have to shut me up by shooting me, and at that point my life stats go flat on the Themis and everyone immediately knows something is up.”

“How about you shut up and I promise to at least drop you on a planet and not into open space?”

“That’s fair.”

Curtis had been hoping to distract him long enough for the ship to get all the way through the wormhole, but the striker finally opened. The soldier grabbed his arm and shoved him in, and to Curtis’ dismay these ships and this little hangar were also made for quick activity with low reaction times. He had to struggle to get up from where he’d fallen on the floor thanks to his hands being behind his back, and by the time he made it to the second cockpit seat and dropped into it all that was on the viewscreen was the bright, flickering light of the wormhole around them and the massive form of the Galra cruiser dropping away.

“Oh crap,” Curtis whispered as the striker fell back, the radiation of the wormhole hiding it from both ships’ sensors. The Themis passed them as well, both ships heading for the mouth of open space at the end of the glowing tunnel. His only real hopes for survival, disappearing as the small striker diverted downward toward the wormhole wall.

It hit with force, and Curtis was unable to grab onto anything thanks to his bindings. The striker shook violently and he was jostled around, thrown forward against the console and nearly deafened by the roar of the friction threatening to tear the little ship apart.

And then it was over, and everything was silent. Curtis opened his eyes to find his face had been saved from slamming into the console by the gloved hand that had caught his forehead. They were drifting out in quiet, open space.

The soldier pushed him back in his seat and ran his fingers over the buttons in front of him, bringing up a star map Curtis was familiar with. He did a quick constellation search to calculate their location then punched in coordinates for a planet Curtis didn't recognize.

“Where are we going?” He asked, feeling sick as he watched the star map flicker off.

“You’re supposed to shut up,” the soldier answered, locking the controls so they couldn’t be used without his code and rising from his seat. “Keep up your part of the bargain, or I’ll ignore mine and you’ll go out the airlock.”

He disappeared into the back, leaving Curtis alone in the cockpit. It was the last thing he wanted, because it gave him a chance to really think about his situation. He was alone with one of Honerva’s most dangerous pet weapons, in the middle of Galra space, with no Coalition backup and no easy way to safety. He had no weapons, he had a space suit but no helmet, his comms were Themis-specific and didn’t work at this range.

Maybe Shiro was right. Maybe he should have retired.

 


	3. Chapter 3

It was the longest two hours of Curtis’ life.

He had been in direct danger more than once in his military career, both on the Atlas and on the Themis, and he woke up every day knowing it could be his last. And unlike those who had died during the Galra occupation, his picture would no longer go on the Garrison public memorial.

He would get a star, carved into the black marble monolith that lay as a monument in the courtyard of the small, unmapped base forty miles east of Atqasuk, Alaska. Hidden away in the north, where nobody would see it but the few with the clearance to go to the highly classified base. It wouldn’t have a name, it wouldn’t have a date, his records would be destroyed. Just a star to represent that he’d existed and died in the line of duty.

Now that he’d had two hours to think about the fact that he was probably going to be nothing but a carved star, he felt a little indignant about it. Most of this wouldn’t even be so classified if Coalition planets hadn’t become so complacent so quickly. They’d spent the early years after liberation relying on the Paladins, and then when the Paladins stopped leading they just let anyone with nice clothes and charismatic speeches take over.

Curtis had always hated politics, but he hated them more as time wore on. Specifically, he hated politicians. Most of them deserved to be catapulted into the nearest sun.

He’d still be doing what he was doing even if the public knew about the war, but at least his only memorial wouldn’t be up in Bumfuck, Icytown.

Several times during the trip he was sure the need for that memorial would be coming very soon, as the striker kept a steady course through Galra space. The soldier had remained in the back for the entire flight, doing God only knew what, while Curtis sat curled up uncomfortably in the cockpit with a front row seat to one of his biggest nightmares.

Galra ships would appear on the viewscreen, sometimes cruisers and sometimes smaller vessels, and Curtis’ instinct to take evasive maneuvers would kick in. He could do nothing, of course, so he was forced to sit there with his heart pounding, holding his breath like that would actually do anything, watching the scene play out. The ships didn’t hail them, thank God, but they did ping the striker, checking to make sure they weren’t from a rival faction.

Each time Curtis would watch the message coming up on the screen, stating that an identity scan was taking place. A program would automatically run then, some kind of security breaker code that he had never seen, backscanning the signal and reverse engineering the appropriate ID code. Numbers, letters, and symbols would fly across the screen too fast for Curtis to read, and then a code would be settled on and sent.

He would wait for it to fail, for other strikers to be dispatched to destroy their ship. But it didn’t. It never did, each time the automatic system would accept the code and allow them to continue on their way through the territory unaccosted.

It was a brilliant system, actually, and Curtis was a little bit jealous of it. They had Galra technology, they could easily reassemble some of the captured strikers from the occupation, if they had that ID breaker the Coalition could send its soldiers so much farther with so much more ease. But that had likely been created by Honerva, and she’d had the benefit of ten-thousand-years of experience with Galra military tech.

Eventually he got uncomfortable with his hands bound behind his back. It took some time—and some very painful twisting and flipping in his chair, but after a few tries he managed to get his arms down under his legs and get his hands in front of him.

He started to play with the controls just to see if there was anything that wasn’t locked. Curtis had logged hundreds of hours in the simulator on Galra ships, he knew his way around a console. But as he expected, nothing happened except buttons lighting up to register he’d touched them. Every press only resulted in a warning flashing briefly across the viewscreen that the system was locked down. He kept trying anyway, on the off chance there was some minor system that wasn’t locked. Maybe he could use that as a back door.

“Repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result is supposedly a mark of insanity onset.”

Curtis nearly jumped three feet into the air at the mechanical voice sounding behind him, whipping around to find the soldier leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed. He looked no less imposing now than he had two hours ago.

“Make a fucking noise when you move!” Curtis spat, his frustration starting to get the better of him. “Jesus Christ. How long have you been standing there?”

“Half a varga.”

“Ugh, creep.”

The soldier pushed away from the doorway and returned to his seat in the cockpit. As he sat down he held something out with two fingers, dropping it in Curtis’ lap without waiting for him to try and catch it. Curtis picked up the small metallic pouch suspiciously, turning it over.

It was a rations packet, the kind commonly found on the Galra ships they seized. It was a liquid infused with all necessary nutrients, not exactly made for enjoyment but at least meant to sustain soldiers. They were a wonder of science, really, they just really sucked the fun out of eating and drinking. The offer gave him at least a little bit of hope, though; the rations on this ship were probably measured and limited to just enough to cover a mission, that the guy was willing to part with this kind of resource meant he at least didn’t mean to kill him right away.

“Your moisture levels are at 55%. You should have rehydrated vargas before we even left the cruiser.”

Curtis glanced up from the packet, raising an eyebrow. Part of him wanted to tell the soldier to mind his own business, but unfortunately he was right. All of the time spent in zero gravity over the last day meant that his bodily fluids had naturally pooled around his chest and core, which tricked his body into thinking he was carrying more water than he was. Protocol was to stop at certain intervals and rehydrate whether thirsty or not, but he’d been so wrapped up in his find he had completely forgotten.

Grudgingly, he twisted the cap from the corner of the packet  and sipped at the contents. It tasted like the smell of old gym socks.

“How do you know what my hydration levels are?” He dared to ask after a few moments of choking down the horrible liquid. “Is this striker outfitted with a medical scanner too?”

“No, I have a compositional scanner built into my sensors. I just know what your composition is supposed to be, and it currently isn’t.”

A compositional scanner built into his sensors. He had to be talking about the suit, if the striker didn’t have any additional scanning software.

Curtis sat back in his seat and tilted his head a little, looking at the soldier out of the corner of his eye. He definitely moved like a human. And he spoke like a human, even if the mask distorted his voice. He was typing something into the console, and when he paused to think for a moment he idly tapped his finger on the character board in a very human gesture.

He wanted to believe that meant this guy had interacted with other humans at some point. Curtis was trying not to think of the soldier as a copy of Shiro, even though he knew deep down that was exactly what he was, trying very hard not to let thoughts of his ex-husband superimpose traits that weren’t there. The best thing to be was impartial, to treat this soldier like just another piece of Galra equipment and not give him the benefit of the doubt. If he did, and he was wrong, he was dead.

Curtis turned his gaze to the suit the soldier wore. It covered him from head to toe, and didn’t look like it was meant to be easily disassembled. It wasn’t the kind of outfit where one pulled off their gloves to touch something, or took off their helmet while exploring the surface of a planet. This was serious, heavy duty material that was probably even laser proof.

Except for one spot. He had been too panicked to notice it in the beginning, but he saw it now as the soldier leaned forward to work the controls. At the back of the helmet was a clamp that looked like it could be loosened and tightened slightly, the only visible opening on the whole suit. It was adjusted to allow a long braid to hang down, jet black with a streak of white going through it. It reached almost down to about the soldier’s tailbone.

That was definitely a weird bit of vanity to add to suit like that.

“So what else do your scanners pick up?” He asked, knowing he shouldn’t push his luck but taking some hope from the rations offering. “My height? Weight? Star sign?”

“Six feet, five inches,” the soldier answered without looking up at him. “Two hundred ten pounds. I have no idea what day you were born, but cellular decay places you between thirty-two and forty years old.”

“You can read my goddamn cellular decay?” Curtis asked in disbelief. “Jesus, can you see what color my spleen is, too?”

“I don’t see colors, only wavelength measurements.”

That had been sarcasm, and Curtis hadn’t been expecting an answer. The reply he did get was intriguing though.

“You can’t see colors?” He repeated. “So you can tell me my weight, but not the color of my eyes?”

“I don’t know what you look like at all, only your information readouts. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t care.”

He sounded indifferent, nowhere near as irritated as he had initially been. A few hours to himself to take stock of his situation must have helped, he wasn’t wound so tightly. Maybe that boded well.

“I’m confused. You can’t…see?”

“Humanoid sight is just the evolved ability to see reflected light waves,” the soldier answered. “It’s not the most efficient sense out in a universe where the default is darkness. My scanners pick up necessary information about my environment without the necessity of light reflection.”

The way he talked about sight was almost chilling, like it was just some useless, frivolous sense he had no need for. Obviously it wasn’t the end all, be all of senses, of course, Curtis knew blind people who functioned just fine. But even they didn’t talk like this guy did.

“When was the last time you saw anything without using your scanners?”

It was the most innocent question he’d asked so far. Everything else had given him information that could potentially be used against his captor, it told him something about his abilities and could perhaps aid in figuring out a weakness. But that last question, completely worthless as far as self defense, was apparently the wrong one.

“Landing in ten doboshes.”

The soldier rose and grabbed Curtis by the front of his flight suit, lifting him out of the chair and shoving him back against the cockpit wall. He ran his wrist over the restraints, a small scan pad lighting up and unlocking the cuffs with their signal. As they fell away the soldier grabbed them, then flipped Curtis around and slammed him face-first against the wall. His arms were roughly pulled back behind him, fastened once again behind his back.

Clearly his little manipulation had not gone unnoticed.

He was shoved out of the cockpit, sent stumbling into the back of the striker where he fell face-down. He managed to turn his head to avoid too much injury, but his cheek still hit the floor and he was sure it was going to leave a bruise.

It hammered home the fact that he still had to be careful. The soldier was unpredictable, and just because he was alive now didn’t mean he was going to stay that way. He just might be able to talk his way into surviving this whole thing, but he had to watch what he said.

There was no point in getting up, he knew he’d just be thrown back out of whatever seat he took when the striker landed since he wasn’t able to fasten a harness. Curtis worked himself up into a sitting position and scooted back against the wall, splaying his legs out in case the ship tilted and he slid and needed to stop himself from hitting something. He tried to count down the ten minutes in his head, but every second felt like an hour.

He felt it when the artificial gravity kicked off and the natural gravity of a large planetary body took over. The familiar roar of friction outside the ship told him they were sinking through an atmosphere, and at length he finally felt everything go still. They had landed.

It was a few more minutes while the soldier locked down the ship, then he appeared in the hold. He grabbed the front of Curtis’ flight suit again, pulling him up to his feet, then pushed him ahead of him out the airlock.

It was dark, weirdly like an inner city parking garage in the middle of the night. High overhead, slowly dying lightbulbs flickered a sick yellow light that just barely illuminated the domed roof. The metal panels leaked, falling like a slow rain to dampen the cement-like surface of the ground. Over to the far right was a large opening where small craft were taxiing in and out, and past it he could see faint lights in the distance and a cloudy nighttime sky. He was pushed forward in the opposite direction, into a plain, dirty hallway that felt weirdly like he was walking through some kind of underground city train station.

Nobody passed them on their way. It was just him and the soldier in the yellow-stained hall, walking past suspicious puddles and rusty doors marked with warnings not to enter. At the end was a double doors and some stairs, and Curtis was steered up them.

He didn’t know what he’d expected, but this was not it. Neon lights, humid air, buildings reaching up so high it almost felt like the sky was invisible. Loud music poured out of doorways, vehicles clogged the road, people walked by either in weird clothes or in various states of undress.

And by people of course that meant Galra.

There were some other species mixed in, but for the most part these had to be Galra civilians. It was a jolt of dissonance, seeing the equivalent of a major Earth city filled with people who weren’t human. He had never even really seen Galra civilians, only faction soldiers, it was almost impossible to believe what he was seeing was real.

But it was. Groups of teenagers walked together, laughing loudly. Young adults wandered by in pairs, holding hands and obviously on dates. People went in and out of brightly lit doorways promising dancing and drinking.

There wasn’t a fighter to be seen. They had to be so deep in Galra territory they were past the militarized zones.

The soldier jabbed him in the back with his knuckles to make him start walking again. A few people who passed glanced over at them, but all they did was move a little bit out of the way as they walked. It took Curtis a moment to realize that he was the alien here, some foreign prisoner being transported through. The soldier was wearing a Galra insignia, they undoubtedly assumed he belonged here.

“Fortunes!” A loud, husky voice came from his left as a tall woman stepped out of a shop doorway, bringing a cloud of incense-scented air along with her. “Ten GAC to read your cards! Two readings for fifteen!”

Curtis almost tripped over his own feet, but his captor caught him and righted him. He steered him past the fortune teller, then past a man offering free samples at a food stand. Some children, barely old enough to be out playing alone, stopped to gawk at them before a woman appeared and called them away.

It was an assault on the senses. Food, perfume, music, shouting, familiar and alien all at once. Dark shadows, bright lights, he didn’t know where he was going and didn’t know how the soldier could possibly tell either.

It went on for another ten minutes or so, until they reached a building with wording Curtis definitely recognized. He dug in his heels when he was pushed toward the door, refusing to go any further.

“No. No way,” he protested, feeling panic beginning to swell in his chest.

“I promised I’d leave you on a planet instead of in space,” the soldier answered. “I never said it would be a good planet.”

A hand gripped the back of Curtis’ neck, lifting him up until he was forced to stand on his toes. He was pushed forward through the door, into a quiet, businesslike lobby that spoke to just how common the transactions that went down here were in the Galra empire.

“Selling,” the soldier stated. A woman sitting behind the desk didn’t even look up. She handed him a ticket of some sort and pointed down a hallway to their left. “End of the hall, take the stairwell down.”

There was absolutely nothing Curtis could do to get any kind of leverage. His arms were trapped behind his back and the grip on the back of his neck was painful. He tried not to walk forward but it proved to be useless, he was forced down the hall and through the doorway to the stairs. Two flights down and then out another door, into a hallway that was much darker in ways that didn’t only have to do with light.

He could barely see, and to be honest he was glad. He could just make out the chain-link fencing on either side of them as they walked through the basement, the pens where people were being held against their will. Kidnappees, trafficked tourists, there were a lot of things he could hear that he didn’t think he’d ever forget.

This was not a place he wanted to be. He had helped to rescue Coalition POWs from places like this, flesh traders out on Galra space stations, but nobody was ever going to find him here to return the favor. Not this deep in Empire territory, with no idea of where he was or how he’d even gotten off the cruiser. Being left here wasn’t an exercise in staying strong until he was found, it was a death sentence.

Or worse.

They stopped suddenly, at the mouth of a round indentation that was trying to be a room but was barely big enough to be considered a closet. He was shoved against a brick wall splotched with stains that were suspiciously red in nature, and the soldier let him go. Curtis tried not to look down, tried not to see what might have been left behind by previous unwitting guests in this little oubliette, trying not to focus too hard on anything in the fizzling, weak light of the bulb hanging overhead.

The soldier leaned against the opening, perfectly calm and collected. And of course he would be, this wasn’t the crossroads where he was potentially going to end up hauled off somewhere to be worked to death.

Curtis had to close his eyes, force himself to breathe. His heart was beating so hard his chest hurt, and his brain was screaming that this was the end. It took him a good five minutes to get a handle on himself, to tell himself that he was a trained special forces soldier and that no matter where he ended up he would find his way out.

A heavyset, gruff-sounding Galra stopped by the opening. He grabbed Curtis’ chin and spun him around, taking a look at his potential purchase. He offered a thousand GAC but was only met with a scoff, and eventually moved on.

There were three more. A woman and two more men, each looking for something different. One wanted a laborer, one wanted a new addition to what sounded like a very carnal business, one didn’t actually say what he was looking for but his sneer was bone-chilling and Curtis knew without a doubt he did not want to go with him. The highest offered price was two-thousand, and they were all turned away.

At least Curtis knew he was expensive. Small victories.

It was about an hour in when a very shifty looking Galra man wandered by, wearing a cloak to cover his clothes. He was covered in scars, and had a very grim air about him. He passed by twice, and on the third time finally stopped.

“Does he fight?” He asked.

“He’s a soldier,” the soldier answered. “I assume so.”

“Hm.”

The Galra came closer, gripping Curtis’ hair and tilting his head to the left and right to get a better look at him. He examined his flight suit, tapping the armored sections and nudging the soft sides as if to check whether he had muscle.

“Four thousand,” he offered.

For the first time, the soldier raised his head in interest. Apparently they were getting close to what he was willing to take.

“Five.”

“Fine.”

Not even an argument. Curtis swallowed thickly, knowing what that meant. He was probably going to be put somewhere he was going to end up hurt very, very badly one way or another, and the show was going to make this Galra much more than five thousand GAC in return.

The Galra took out what looked like a chain leash from in his cloak, but the soldier stopped him before he could go any further.

“In cash. Let me see the money.”

The Galra snorted, but smirked in mild amusement. He pulled a wad of bills out of his inner pocket and handed them over, and the soldier took his time counting it out. He tucked the money into a pouch at his hip, then took the chain leash.

Curtis tensed when the soldier moved, too quickly for him to follow. In the dark, with all the noise down here, he honestly didn’t know what was going on until the Galra stiffened and clawed at his neck. It was only then that Curtis spotted the chain around his neck, looped over one of several rusted hooks up on the wall and pulling him up to cut off his air. He struggled for a few moments until he finally sagged, unconscious, and the soldier released the chain.

Curtis watched in shock as the soldier leaned down and pulled back the cloak, lifting another wad of money from a pocket and a ring of what looked like little charms. He straightened back up and grabbed Curtis’ suit, hauling him out of the little room and back the way they’d come.

He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew he wasn’t walking out with somebody worse. Yet. And at the moment, that was all that really mattered.

They went back up the stairs, back down the hall. At the front desk the soldier handed back the ticket.

“No takers,” he said gruffly.

“Better luck next time,” the woman said boredly. “Hundred-fifty GAC for the facility use fee.”

The soldier pulled out some of the money he’d taken and dropped it on the desk.

“Three hundred and we weren’t here.”

“Never saw you before in my life,” the woman answered easily, sliding the excess bills across the desk and tucking them away in her pocket. Curtis wondered just how much she made on any given night just for turning a blind eye. “Have a good evening.”

The soldier only grunted. He grabbed Curtis’ arm and hauled him back across the small lobby, but instead of going out the front doors he turned through one that had a faded old plaque that looked like it said ‘parking’. Sure enough it was another hallway, this one letting out into a parking lot.

Galra cars weren’t too different from human ones. Apparently there were only so many ways to create a personal vehicle.

The soldier started walking along the rows, holding out the ring of charms. At the second row a vehicle’s lights turned on when they got close, and Curtis realized at least one of them must have been some kind of car fob. He was shoved into the passenger seat, where he watched the soldier walk around the car.

Even Galra vehicles must have had some kind of identification. The soldier quickly went down the row removing small plates, mixing them up as he came back. He replaced what was probably the wrong one on the car they were apparently stealing, then climbed in the driver seat and started it up.

Curtis held his breath and sank down in his seat. He was suitably cowed, now aware of just how easily he could be disposed of if he was too much of an annoyance too soon. It was a real life miracle that he wasn’t on his way to a blood ring right now, he was honestly shaken.

The soldier said nothing. The car—if it could be called a car—remained silent, and Curtis didn’t know enough about the controls on this thing to ask about a radio even if he had been feeling brave enough to talk. He turned his attention out the window instead, trying not to let his arms cramp up from how they were stuck behind him.

Lights and storefronts flashed by at high speed, and Curtis’ stomach lurched every few minutes when the soldier cut off other motorists. He wasn’t a terribly good driver, and he didn’t seem to understand there was such a thing as “flow of traffic” speed. For a few minutes, along one particularly congested stretch of road, it looked like a 50/50 chance they’d both die in a flaming wreck.

It was a small relief when the bigger buildings started to fall away and the streets grew darker, the car speeding through what might have been a residential area. That eventually disappeared as well, and for a little while Curtis’ attention was completely absorbed by the outside world.

The foliage here was so different from Earth, trees that could rival sequoias and ferns that looked like something out of a book on megaflora. Everything was green, where it wasn’t interrupted by flashes of colorful flowers he caught sight of in the headlights, the air smelling strange. Wet, like after rainfall, but with a strange tinge to it. Like the rain here was made up of something other than water.

They stopped twice at refueling stations, sleek and high-tech oases in the middle of these wilds. Now and then they passed road signs, written in a non-standard dialect of Galra Curtis couldn’t always decipher.

At some point, the stress of fear temporarily wore off, and the quiet monotony of the scenery lulled him to sleep. Curtis woke up to the sound of the car door slamming, shooting upright in temporary confusion over his surroundings. He was harshly reminded of what was going on as his door was open and he was pulled out of the car.

The planet’s sun was rising, painting everything in the faint light of dawn. The car was parked at the end of what looked like a long drive hidden by trees and large plants, in front of a small house in the style of familiar Galra architecture. The soldier grabbed a bag out of the backseat and steered him inside, and on the way he could see there were some distant neighbors. Nobody who was close enough to hear anything though, and much of the view was blocked by more greenery.

It had the look of some kind of small town. Wild, sparsely populated, quiet. As he stepped inside the musty-smelling building, the mostly empty interior covered with dust, he was even more certain. This was the kind of place nobody noticed a house was unlived in.

It was dark inside, probably no electricity. Curtis moved slowly once the front door was closed, having no idea if there was anything in front of him. The windows had looked like they were only covered with some kind of curtains from outside, but on the inside they were sealed up tight with sheets of either wood or metal.

He heard the soldier moving in the dark, and remained still until he was sure what was going on. There was a lot of rustling, the sounds of things being opened. Metal on metal, and eventually the glow of a computer viewscreen. The faint blue light showed the outlines of some other electronics that had been taken out of a case by the far wall, laid out and hooked up into some kind of communications rig.

It didn’t look like there was anything else in the room. This was a safehouse, not a home. That explained why the soldier had plotted a course for here, and how he’d known where he was going.

Whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it. Some kind of signal perhaps, some sign that he was being followed or an ally beacon he could follow. Curtis wondered if he believed him yet, if he understood that Honerva was gone and that any soldiers he would have worked with or for were either dead or scattered throughout space following rival factions. He switched through channels and frequencies for a few minutes before he gave up and pulled a thick metal ring out of his newfound gear.

Curtis winced when he approached and reached for him, waiting to be grabbed or shoved or thrown around again. Instead he felt his left glove pulled down and a pinch as the ring was closed firmly around his wrist. He blinked, wiggling his hand to try and test what it was, as the restraints were finally removed.

“Upstairs,” the soldier ordered.

“I can’t see where the stairs are.”

That gave him pause. For the first time he looked a little taken aback, even chagrined, which was a feat considering his face wasn’t visible. He disappeared from Curtis’ side for a moment, then light flooded the room. So the place did have power, he just didn’t need light.

The stairs were in the far corner of the room, sleek and modern, a spiral of metal steps that took them up to the small house’s single bedroom. It had a simple bed in the corner, a small door that was probably a closet, and another door opening into a little bathroom on the far side.

“Clean up,” the soldier ordered. “Get rid of the armor, it’s too conspicuous.”

Curtis hadn’t seen him pick the bag back up, but he dropped it on the bed now. They didn’t have plastic bags here, it was some kind of fabric printed with the usual “thank you for shopping” pattern.

“Don’t go within six inches of the perimeter,” the soldier warned as he headed back down the stairs. “Unless you enjoy having fifty thousand volts running through you.”

He disappeared, as if Curtis was no longer of interest. It was a relief to be left alone again to gather his thoughts, a few minutes at least without being watched. The bracelet around his wrist was probably what would shock him if he got too close to a window or outer door, some kind of tool for taking and keeping prisoners. He wondered if the bracelet itself sensed whatever surrounded the perimeter, or if it could somehow read his body’s electricity and tell if he was close at all.

He decided not to test it. Fifty thousand volts was about standard for a taser, and he knew from experience it wasn’t fun.

He waited a moment to make sure he was really alone, then opened the small closet. As he expected, there were a few sets of clothes hanging there. One actually had a slice in the side and was stained with old, dried blood, and there was a red handprint on the lid of the white box on the floor that turned out to be a medic kit.

Curtis was familiar with these sights. He had used safehouses before in his own work, he knew the ins and outs.

He grabbed a set of unused civilian clothes, very similar to the things he had seen Kolivan wear outside of his Blade armor, and then looked around the room. There really was nowhere to hide anything, so he had to take a chance.

It was difficult to move the end of the bed away from the wall, going slowly so that it didn’t scrape and his footfalls didn’t sound too heavy. When it was out far enough he carefully balanced on the edge and removed the flash drives from his gloves, stowing the Kuron Project information up out of sight in the light fixture. When he was done he moved the bed back and stripped down, leaving the armor on the floor by the wall.

Curtis hadn’t realized just how dirty he was until he had finally figured out the control panel on the shower and the cold spray hit him. He would have far preferred hot but he couldn’t easily see how to change temperature and he didn’t want to be in here too long. The toiletries here were simple; small vials of liquid soap and shampoo, and they paired well enough with the cold water to do the job.

More than a full day now of sweat, dirt from the flesh market, general grime from investigating the cruiser. It washed away down the drain and he dried himself with one of two course towels he found, pulling on the softer clothes when he was done. They were more comfortable, but he felt very unprotected without his armor.

The armor that was gone when he came out of the bathroom, just as he’d suspected it would be. The soldier would probably destroy it, to be sure he got rid of any communication devices or tracking measures. It was the smart thing to do.

Curtis walked a circle around the room, carful not to get too close to the walls. There were two windows, both boarded up from the inside so he had no view of their surroundings. The floor was bare, the bed had only the simplest of coverings. He caught sight of the bag again and sat down, opening it up to see what was inside.

A canister of water, and two packages. One he recognized as the sweet bread their Galra allies enjoyed for a snack, almost like a slice of cake. The other had a sandwich that was still warm, some kind of meat that was probably native to the planet.

Curtis gave it a try. It was heavily spiced but not unpleasant, but even if it had tasted terrible the sudden growling of his stomach would have spurred him to finish it anyway. The water was also a welcome respite for his drying mouth and throat.

The cake was a question mark. Curtis already knew he liked it, he’d had them before. It was just an odd choice if somebody was putting together a strictly utilitarian meal to make sure a prisoner didn’t die, the kind of thing one added to try and make the act of eating a little more pleasant. It was high in sugars and fats, not really known for its nutritional value. Really, the only reason to include it was the knowledge that people enjoyed sweet things.

Curtis left the cake wrapped for now, putting the empty water canister and sandwich wrapping back in the bag. He braced himself and braved going downstairs to see what his captor was up to.

He standing by the far wall, with a picture taken down. Behind it there was a safe, and he was looking through the various pistols, guns, and knives that were stowed inside.

“Where’s my armor?” Curtis asked. He already knew the answer, but it was the kind of question that would be expected. It was probably better to play at least a little bit dumb, not let the guy know just how much he knew about these kinds of operations.

“Gone,” the soldier answered without looking up. He picked out two pistols and slid them into the holster slots on his thighs, removing the larger weapons he had originally been equipped with and stowing them away in the safe. “I suggest you forget anything you had stowed in it.”

He closed the safe, and Curtis didn’t need to look too closely to know he wouldn’t be able to open it very easily. Clearly the soldier didn’t think so either, he strolled across the room and headed outside.

“Hey, hold on! Where do you think you’re going?” Curtis asked, starting to follow. As he started to step through the door the cuff on his wrist vibrated in warning, and he quickly jumped back before it went off.

“Out.”

“I can see that! Out where? You stick out like a sore thumb in that getup!”

The soldier stopped and turned suddenly, closing the distance between them. Curtis was taller, but when he suddenly found himself nose to nose with that imposing mask he had to admit he was a little bit nervous.

“At what point did I say it was okay to ask me questions?” The soldier asked.

Curtis sensed that was a rhetorical question, and kept his mouth shut. The soldier didn’t move for a few seconds, but finally stepped away and started to leave again.

“I’m going on a supply run,” he said gruffly. “Mercenaries come through here all the time, nobody will look twice. Stay away from the windows and doors.”

He pulled the door closed behind him before Curtis could say anything else.

Curtis stayed where he was. He waited until he heard the vehicle start up and pull away, and then he counted two minutes. Once he was sure his captor wouldn’t return, he bolted up the stairs and dragged the bed back across the room to retrieve his flash drives.

He honestly didn’t care where the soldier was going or what he was doing, he had only been concerned with how long he would possibly be gone. A supply run probably meant at least half an hour, which Curtis could work with if he moved fast.

Ten years stowed away in a cryo-pod meant the soldier was ten years behind on espionage methods and hacking software. Curtis had been on the front lines of breaking into Galra tech for almost five years now, no matter how advanced for its time the hardware here was it was still just going to be legacy crap with a few fancy bells and whistles. The biggest threat here was the soldier himself, and if he wasn’t nearby then there was no real threat.

Curtis darted back downstairs and slid to his knees by the communications setup. As he suspected, everything here was locked down just like the striker had been. On top of that, there was most likely some kind of key logger that kept track of everything that was done, one that would let its owner know if somebody had been messing with it.

It would look more suspicious if Curtis didn’t try anything while alone. He made a few simple attempts to get in, hopefully enough to make it look like he didn’t know what he was doing. Then he plugged one of the flash drives into the small main tower.

This old tech had long since been cracked, to the point where he didn’t even have to manually do anything. The program on the flash drive ran automatically, dismantling the security bit by bit without leaving any telltale keystrokes. It took about ten minutes, but eventually the system rebooted and the home screen came up, granting him access.

Curtis worked fast. He ran a scan for open Coalition channels but found none that reached this far into enemy territory. It was a good thing he had been a Communications officer then, and that this was his forte.

Five more minutes and one signal piggybacking off multiple Galra ones later, Curtis was sending an unidentified hail to the console of the one person he thought might be helpful to him right now.

It took a minute to get an answer. As Curtis watched the readouts, he saw his signal being rerouted through a complicated web of signals before it was answered. Somebody was not at his post right now, but was doing some computer magic to make it look like it was.

“ _ICS Themis, please state your identification code_.”

“IDC Why Aren’t You At Your Post,” Curtis answered. “Why is an encrypted signal being routed from the secure console on the Themis to wherever it is you are, Ensign Steuber?”

“Sir!” There was a rustling noise, followed by the sounds of things being dropped.

“Keep your voice down, Ensign,” Curtis commanded. “I need your help with something and I need it kept quiet for the moment.”

“Yes sir!” Steuber barked, followed by a much softer “Er, yes, sir.”

More sounds, this time of movement. Curtis thought he heard a door close, and then ambient noise died down.

“Where are you now, Steuber?”

“Second floor waiting of the Quarantine sector of the fallback base,” Steuber answered. “In a utility closet right now. Where are you? I can’t bring up the visual.”

“Old equipment, you’re not going to be able to,” Curtis answered. There was no need for video when the intended user couldn’t see. “I’m not sure where I am, that’s where you come in.”

“The Admiral is having a very hard time keeping the Commander under control, sir,” Steuber answered, referring to Shiro respectfully by the title that these days was nominal only. “He’s having a meltdown. They won’t tell the crew anything…we found you gone, a high level team did a sweep of the storage pod bay, and now everything’s hush hush. The higher ups are panicking.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a malfunctioning high-grade weapon running around and I’m stuck with it at the moment,” Curtis grumbled. “They have a reason to be panicking. Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I have a drive here I used to download files from a separate mainframe on the cruiser. I wiped the files from the ship but I still have them here, are you able to break the encryption on these like you did with the ship security?”

“I should be able to, if you can hook it into this connection, sir.”

“I’ll do that now. But Steuber, listen to me carefully. I’m giving you direct orders right now under wartime protocol…you are not to mention to anyone that I contacted you.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no sir,” Steuber stuttered. “….why, sir?”

“Because the Commander is too involved to look at this logically and will try to get the Admiral to send an extraction team,” Curtis answered, plugging the second flash drive into the tower. “I’m one expendable soldier, same as anyone else, and right now I’m too far in enemy territory to take the risk. If I can manage to get closer to the border and contact you again, I’ll do it with coordinates you can give to them.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Can I assume that you have the ability to hack into the Themis security center and grant yourself access to my quarters?” Curtis asked.

“If I answer yes, will that reflect badly on me, sir?”

“No.”

“Then yes, sir.”

“Okay, stop calling me sir,” Curtis hissed. It was starting to get to him.

“Sorry s— Captain.”

“I need you to get access to the secure console in my quarters,” Curtis ordered. “It’s on a standalone server, you’re going to have to physically get into the room. Once you’re there you should be able to set up a relay similar to the one you’re using so that incoming signals will be routed to you. It’s a private line, if I contact you through it nobody else will know. I may need help again before I’m close enough to let them know where I am.”

“I can do that,” Steuber agreed. “What should I tell them in the meantime?”

“Nothing. You don’t know where I am, neither of us knows if I’ll still be okay an hour from now. You have no new information to give them.”

“All right. Your drive is decrypted, Captain.”

“Thank you. I have to close the line, I can’t be caught on here.”

Curtis didn’t give any further niceties. He killed the connection and then moved over near the door, standing there for a few minutes to make sure he hadn’t somehow missed any sounds of the soldier’s return. When he deemed it safe he went back to the computer, pulling up the Kuron Project files.

He didn’t have time to look at them in-depth, he only skimmed until he found the defense schematics. The file was meant to track problems with the suit that needed to be fixed, but it would also be a guide for how to disable it.

Or so Curtis had thought. Reading it was very disheartening…vacuumproof, airproof, waterproof, bulletproof, laserproof. This thing was a wearable citadel, there were no weak points that hadn’t been found in early testing and reinforced. In the heat of a fight, disarming this thing looked like going up against a tank bare-handed.

Everything in it was a fine-tuned machine. But it was still a machine, which meant that it had to have at least one weakness that was worth giving a shot.

Curtis closed out the file. He accessed his other flash drive, pulling up its list of hacking programs. They were all too basic to beat the Kuron Project’s advanced encryption, but they were certainly capable of taking care of some more minor irritants.

The tools the soldier used all seemed to respond to a wireless signal given by his suit, it was a system made to cut down on the time it took to log into things or open things. The striker, the safe, the handcuffs, and a quick search said even the console, they all responded to a unique signal his suit gave off. It took a bit of searching and a little bit of computer magic, but after a few minutes Curtis was finally able to mock the signal. He used the communications broadcast capability of the computer to send it, and was rewarded with two sounds. The first was the click of the safe on the wall unlocking. The second was the band falling off his wrist onto the floor.

That was the moment Curtis heard the car approaching the safehouse. He ripped the flash drives out of the tower, which started an automatic reset, and grabbed the cuff off the floor. As he ran by, he straightened the picture in front of the safe so it didn’t show the door was ajar, running up the stairs. He stood on his toes and threw the flash drives back into the light fixture as he heard the car door slam closed, and shoved the bed back against the wall.

The sound of the front door opening came just as he threw himself onto the bed, wrapping the cuff back around his arm without fastening it closed. He lay still, forcing his breathing to calm, staring up at the ceiling as if he had been laying here boredly the whole time.

The soldier made an appearance to check that he was still there, eerily quiet as he came up the steps. Curtis glanced over at him as he did a sweep of the room before turning and going back down.

There wasn’t long before he realized something was wrong. Downstairs there was only the empty front room and a small kitchen, in this tiny house there wasn’t much for anyone to do besides check the security. He did have hope that the soldier was tired and off his game by now, it had probably been more than a full day since he’d woken and constant travel wore at the senses. But even if that were the case, his time was still limited.

It had been about an hour and a half, at most, since they’d arrived, which was another reason he had to make his move soon. His captor would be relying on the assumption that he was still confused and out of his element, he would get more wary as time went on and Curtis had a chance to adapt. All of his training and experience told him that the best chances were to be had early on.

He took a deep breath and got up, making his way back downstairs. In the corner the computer had completely rebooted, settled at a lock screen asking for a passcode. That was fine for now, but once the soldier logged in he would find that it was no longer in the same program he’d left it in. He wasn’t near it right now, he was currently in the small kitchen.

Curtis could see him from where he stood in the middle of the front room. He was leaning against the counter with both hands, his head tilted back as if in tired frustration. It was entirely possible he had no plan and was playing this all by ear, and didn’t know what his next move would be. On the counter were two bags, the same fabric shopping bags, but he couldn’t tell what was in them. At least “supplies” seemed to mean “food from a nearby shop” and not “things to use for torture.”

Carefully, Curtis crept over to the picture frame. He paused there for a heartbeat, then pulled all his courage together and knocked it aside. It hit the floor with a loud crash, as he intended, and he pulled open the unlocked safe to grab the nearest blade. It was a hunting knife which would do fine.

He was just backing away from the safe as the soldier came out of the kitchen, holding the blade in a reverse grip and falling into a fighting stance.

Curtis was well trained in how to use a knife in combat. Blades had served him better than guns on many occasions, they were quieter so they didn’t draw attention and they were deadlier when he got close enough to his target. The soldier stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, then his chest shifted as if he were sighing.

“Put the knife down.”

“No,” Curtis answered firmly, already holding the knife tighter. “Come and take it.”

“You can’t hurt me with it,” the soldier pointed out. “And if I have to take it off you, I’m going to break your arm.”

“That’s okay, I’ll take my chances.”

The soldier took a step forward, and Curtis took a step back. There was a pause, then another step forward, and another step back for Curtis. This continued, until Curtis felt his back hit the stair railing and he was left with nowhere else to go.

The soldier moved forward the last few steps, closing the distance between them. He stood there, not even bothering to defend, letting Curtis get a good look up close and realize that the knife would very much be useless. Which it would be, and Curtis was pretty sure if he even tried to use it he would probably hurt himself as the blade rolled off his opponent’s armor.

The soldier reached up and pulled the knife out of his hand, and Curtis let it go. He held it up, the blade dangling from between two fingers.

“You’re smart if you managed to get the safe open, but obviously not a fighter if this is what you picked,” he said flatly.

“You’re right,” Curtis answered, bracing himself. “I am smart.”

He pulled the loose cuff off his arm and snapped it closed around the soldier’s wrist, twisting a little and letting himself fall back. He held onto the soldier’s arm, pulling him forward with him, and as they hit the floor he rolled them both the very short distance to the wall. Curtis flipped around and used his body to brace against the soldier’s, making it difficult for him to move as fast as he would have liked to get leverage.

He felt the arm he was holding shake slightly as the cuff vibrated in warning. On the count of three he let go and pulled away, just in time to avoid sharing the soldier’s fate as the cuff went off.

Fifty-thousand volts was enough to stun a grown man into temporary unconsciousness if held long enough, certainly, but it was also more than enough to wreak havoc on delicate mechanical systems. Curtis watched as the soldier tried to get up, only to stiffen as his armor shorted out and fall limply to the floor.

He didn’t wait to see what would happen. A system like this would reboot quickly, self-diagnostics and repairs would run in the background once it did its job and got its wearer back up and moving. Curtis quickly went back to the computer and started booting it up.

He probably had about five minutes to prove why he was qualified to be the Captain of a stealth Special Forces ship, but if he wasn’t as out of practice as he feared he’d be, he’d only need four.

 


	4. Chapter 4

Curtis sat on the old stump of a fallen tree—if the strange, alien plant lying across the yard could be called a tree—with his arms resting on his knees. He was leaning over with his eyes closed, trying not to be nauseous.

There was a pleasant breeze in this little green space out behind the safehouse. If this planet had seasons it was likely now in something akin to spring, and the strange chittering of the small native fauna in the distance made the whole picture scenic and peaceful.

Or it would, if he wasn’t trying not to throw up.

Curtis had seen a lot of things, many of them terrible. He had cleaned up a lot of messes, seen a lot of injuries. Many people in his profession quickly learned to go emotionally numb, something he refused to do so his morals didn’t suffer, but he understood why so many seasoned agents were cold and callous.

But most of what Curtis had seen had been aftermath. The bodies, the burnt out battlefields. Injuries being tended by medics, corpses being bagged. The Coalition did not condone or use torture, and since the arrival of troops usually brought any such ongoing activities to a halt he had never witnessed the tactics himself.

Until today. But he wasn’t sure how much of his disquiet was caused by what he’d seen, and how much of it came from his intimate ties with Shiro. The knowledge that the soldier he was dealing with was a clone of his ex-husband was a liability, it made him reluctant to use lethal force and was likely making him more empathetic in this situation than he would have been otherwise.

Once his stomach settled, Curtis got up and reluctantly went back inside, returning to the computer equipment in the corner. The soldier was kneeling in the middle of the room, unable to move thanks to the signal being sent to his suit.

While he was down, Curtis had used the same concept he’d seen the striker use on other Galra ships. He’d backscanned the signal being sent from the armor to control the electronics, then turned it around and used it to send commands back. The suit was now locked in place, a snug-fitting prison keeping the soldier from being able to so much as twitch.

Curtis took a look at the computer logs and wasn’t surprised at all to see that there was a battle going on. The electronics in the armor responded to neural stimuli, what more primitive cultures who didn’t understand the tech would call mind control. It was used in prosthetics, to make new limbs function just like the original ones they had been made to replace.

But the suit’s computers also responded this way. The soldier didn’t have to have a keyboard to type on to try and work around the program holding him down, he just had to mentally give commands the way he worked the armor. And he was doing so, albeit with no success.

The man kneeling in front of him was smart. So very smart, Curtis could see that. If he wasn’t ten years behind on technology, there was no way the program Curtis was running on the computer would be able to match him. Line by line the log was showing repeated attempts to attack the program from all directions, each easily parried by code that had been written more than five years go.

If Iverson had found the other Kuron subjects dead in their tubes and Shiro had recognized the project, they were right to be worried. The only thing making this guy near unstoppable was his limited knowledge of the present.

Curtis ignored the running log, turning his attention instead to the file open on the screen. Once the soldier had been down he’d retrieved his flash drives, and was now able to go through the Kuron Project information at a more reasonable pace. What he’d found in the last hour was…disturbing.

He looked at the blueprint in front of him and tried not to feel sick again. As it turned out, the suit the soldier was wearing wasn’t armor. It was an artificial exoskeleton.

The reason he had never removed his helmet or changed out of it was because it was made not to be removed. It plugged into his nervous system through several places in his spine and was fastened into place by what looked like screws going into bone. It was so airtight because it was made to completely cut off the wearer from the outside world, permanently.

Now Curtis understood that the braid wasn’t a point of vanity. Human hair grew at a consistent rate, it was the only thing that needed an outlet as its length increased so it could be accessed to cut.

The soldier’s strange motions outside of his pod and near the striker now also made sense. The way he tugged absently at the helmet as if it were uncomfortable, but he wasn’t able to just remove it.

The Kuron Project was a nightmare the extent of which he didn’t think even Shiro knew. Shiro’s prosthetic arm was just a test prototype, a piece of machinery meant to test the human nervous system’s compatibility with the suit technology. It was easier to put on one prosthetic limb to test for software bugs than to waste a whole suit, and if he died another prosthetic could simply be attached to the first clone in line.

Which brought them to the clones. Curtis was not an alchemist, but he understood that Honerva had been one. A very skilled, powerful one who had practiced for ten thousand years. She had been capable of implanting the consciousness of underlings who angered her into her robeasts, the same way Allura had been able to move Shiro from the Black Lion into what had apparently been an empty clone.

It was an immortality project. The suit was meant to last forever, but a biological pilot for it was superior to any programming. A steady supply of clones meant that when the body inside was damaged or deteriorated beyond repair it could be removed and discarded, replaced with a new one. But instead of wasting the training and experience, the same soldier could be implanted into the new body and continue on as if nothing happened.

The more Curtis read, the more upsetting the project got. A human being was sealed into this walking tomb in front of him against his will, a human being that by all accounts in this file had been ripped out of a body and implanted into another at least once. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t even breathe or eat. All of his sensory information was processed through the suit, his blood was oxygenated through the support systems. Nutrients had to be in liquid form to be processed through another system in the armor, and the armor had moisture recycling technology to eliminate the need for drainage. Blood from impact injuries, broken fingernails, dead skin cells, there was a layer of some kind of chemical between the suit and the skin to break these things down and filter them out.

Killing the other Kuron subjects on their way out hadn’t been an act of malice. It had been one of mercy.

Curtis perused through the files for a few more minutes, but he finally had to stop. However long this guy had been in cryo, he’d still been consciously trapped and awake in this thing for at least a couple years. None of what he was reading was hypothetical, he had a living, breathing victim right in front of him. He didn’t think he could take much more of reading this today. Instead he got up and moved over to where the soldier sat, carefully lowering himself to sit in front of him.

“My name is Curtis,” he said after a moment. “Curtis Duchesne. I attended the Galaxy Garrison Academy in New Mexico and enlisted after I graduated. I was there when the Galra invaded and I was there when Voltron returned and helped overthrow Sendak. I was the Communications Officer on the IGF Atlas…it was Earth’s first interstellar war ship, it housed the Voltron Lions and was Captained by Takashi Shirogane. It was the ship that helped take out Honerva a decade ago. She’s been dead for a while now.”

No response. The program wasn’t blocking the soldier from speaking, so Curtis knew it was his choice not to answer.

“Do you have a name?” Curtis asked. There was a pause.

“No.”

Even with the mechanics of the mask distorting his voice, that one word sounded almost angry. But Curtis was the one in charge right now, so the soldier could be as sullen as he wanted. It would get him nowhere.

“That wasn’t actually a question. Everyone has a name, or at least a designation. You have to be called something.”

The soldier remained quiet. Curtis gave him a moment, leaving the room in silence instead of immediately dominating the exchange. This man hadn’t been treated like a human being in a very long time, he could at least give him that courtesy. He only spoke up again when it became clear the soldier wasn’t going to say anything.

“I used to teach elementary school,” Curtis said conversationally. “Before the invasion. First grade. There was a girl in my class, Charlotte, she started at our school when her father transferred into the New Mexico base. She didn’t like talking either. As it turned out, English wasn’t her first language and it took her a few minutes to translate everything in her head from French.”

Curtis gave that a moment to sink in, then he switched from English to Japanese.

“The Paladins are all grown up now,” he kept to a topic he thought would be familiar if the Kuron file was accurate, trying to talk the soldier down. “Keith is in charge of the Blade of Marmora now, but they stopped being a spy organization a while back. They administer aid to planets recovering from disasters or wars. Katie works with her parents and Matt, they’ve been developing hybrid Earth/Atlean technology. Hunk runs a chain of restaurants on six different planets. There’s a newly founded Altea now, Lance is the Earth ambassador there. Allura passed away in the fight against Honerva, but Coran heads the Altean Council in her honor.”

He stopped, letting the room grow quiet again. He knew his words had some effect this time, out of the corner of his eye he could see that the computer had stopped logging attempts to circumvent its program.

The soldier knew those names, Curtis could tell. Now if he could just believe Curtis wanted to help and wasn’t an enemy, they were in business.

“KURON-H-44.”

Curtis recognized part of that as the identification code that was on the soldier’s cryo pod. It wasn’t exactly a name, but he had given him the option of a designation. KURON-H-44 fit that description.

“KURON-H-44,” Curtis repeated the identification code. “That’s kind of a mouthful. Can I call you Kuro?”

Curtis picked it at the spur of the moment, but thought it might be something the soldier would be comfortable with. Shiro’s nickname meant ‘white,’ which was ironic now that his hair had turned.  Kuro didn’t have to be short for KURON. On its own, in what was this clone’s native language, the kanji could mean ‘black.’

“Like your hair,” Curtis explained, distancing the nickname further from the project. 

The soldier didn’t say anything. Curtis chose to take it as a lack of protest instead of a lack of permission. It was a tactic that worked well in dealing with Shiro over the years, hopefully it would work here as well.

“Kuro, I want to take your armor off,” Curtis continued after giving him a moment to process the name. “It’s not going to be easy, we both know it’s not supposed to come off. There’s no way I can tie you down to remove it against your will, so all I can do is ask you to let me work on it without trying to stop me.”

This was a gamble. Shiro had often told him he could be too soft-hearted, one of the reasons he’d always worried about Curtis’ job eating him alive, and he knew he was being stupid. He had read kindness in some of Kuro’s actions…stopping him from slamming his head on the console when the striker had left the cruiser, sharing rations before he knew if he would be able to replace them. Adding a little treat in with the meal Kuro had bought him, giving him free reign to wander within the house instead of cuffing him to the stair banister and leaving him in one place, telling him where he was going even after saying he shouldn’t be asking questions.

Curtis knew it was possible he was reading too much into those things, but he didn’t think so. Other, more aggressive species didn’t do those things. Galra didn’t treat their prisoners that way. Kuro’s actions so far, aside from the admittedly harsh ones he’d taken to escape and get here to the safehouse, had all been very innately human.

Kuro gave him no answer, and Curtis didn’t think he was going to. If he really was anything like Shiro then he was pissed off he’d been taken down so easily, though for Curtis’ part he didn’t think it had been very easy at all. He would be at least a little bit petulant, and not inclined to friendly conversation.

“I’m going to shut down the signal that’s keeping you locked down,” Curtis said, getting up off the floor and backing over to the computer. “Once this is off, there’s nothing stopping you from moving. I don’t think you’re the bad guy here, Kuro, I think you’ve been trapped for so long you don’t know who to trust. I just need you to give me a chance to prove we’re on the same side.”

Curtis knew he could probably eventually get back on his own. He could just leave the Kuro here; maybe he’d eventually die of malnutrition, maybe the computer would eventually shut down and let him loose. But he had never been the kind of man who left someone behind before, not if there was even the slightest chance they could be saved, and he wasn’t going to become that man now.

He hesitated for a moment, then shut down the program and waited. He stood stiffly, not bothering to have armed himself, knowing that even if he did he would easily and quickly be overpowered.

Kuro didn’t move. Or rather, he didn’t get up. He moved his head, tilting it from side to side as if it bothered him for his neck to be still for so long, and flexed his fingers in a way that made his gloves scrape softly across the floor. After a moment he waved his opposite wrist over the cuff clamped on him, turning it off and letting it fall away. Other than that he did nothing, remaining on the floor.

 _He wants out of that thing_ , Curtis thought. _Whether I’m an enemy or not, the risk is worth it to him._

Curtis moved slowly, going back out the door that led to the little yard area. He had done a quick search of the place once Kuro had been detained, and found a storage shed with most of the things he expected a high tech safehouse to have. Tools for fixing equipment or damaged vehicles, rations that had would soon be passing their spoilage point, expired checkpoint cards that had become obsolete about eight years ago. He grabbed the tool box and brought it inside, sitting it down on the floor next to Kuro.

“I don’t know if anything I’m going to do is going to hurt,” Curtis admitted, opening the Kuron files back up and looking for the physical blueprint. “You’d know that better than me. But I’m sorry if it does.”

Kuro gave no answer and still didn’t move. He did nothing but watch idly as Curtis opened the tool box and fished around for a specialized bolt removal tool he knew wouldn’t be there, and settled for far less sophisticated items. Whatever was meant to actually take this suit apart was something that was probably found only on Honerva’s cruiser, to make sure the Kuron subjects couldn’t get out of the armor themselves.

“Okay,” Curtis murmured, frowning as he laid out what he did have available. This was going to take a while. “Let’s get to work.”

* * * * * * * * * *

It took more than a while.

As Curtis worked, he found that the fastenings he painstakingly removed one by one really had nothing to do with the seals on the armor itself. Long, screw-like bolts were hidden under caps at various intervals, medical-grade steel drilled through the body and into bone in ways that didn’t hinder movement or do extensive damage but did make taking the armor off impossible for those imprisoned in it.

Curtis did his best to be gentle, but he knew what he was doing must have been excruciating. First he had to find each bolt and work the cap off. Then, since he didn’t have a proper tool to remove them, he had to make do with needle-nose pliers until the bolt was out far enough for him to use a wrench. Every twist set his own teeth on edge as he felt the metal grind against bone that in many cases had healed around it.

Kuro’s reactions were understandable. He kept tensing up, his fingertips scraping at the floor, his body going stiff. Curtis knew he had to be in pain, but he never made a sound. Either that, or he had turned off his helmet’s voice conveyor so he couldn’t be heard.

More impressively though, he didn’t fight back. He didn’t pull away or lash out at Curtis, which spoke volumes for how desperate he was to be free.

The sun was beginning to drift down toward the horizon by the time he was working on the final bolt, but he didn’t really know what that meant. He had no idea how long a day here was, and he hadn’t bothered to look for any kind of timekeeping device. He stopped only to occasionally get some water or use the bathroom, other than that he focused on the job at hand.

His hands were aching, his fingers cut up and sore from working with incorrect tools that kept slipping or jumping. There was blood smeared in places now, from one particularly bad gash on the back of his hand, but Curtis ignored it and kept working. Kuro was so close to finally being free, Curtis wasn’t going to stop and rest if it meant leaving him like this even a few minutes longer than necessary.

The last bolt finally came free and joined the others on the floor. Fourteen lengths of steel, dug out of human bone with no anesthesia over the course of several hours. If this didn’t make it into his nightmares, Curtis didn’t know what would.

“Okay,” Curtis voice was a little bit raspy, his water breaks hadn’t been nearly enough during the day and he had a tendency to mutter to himself and dry his mouth out further while he worked. “I’m going to unlock the helmet.”

He already knew this part wouldn’t be any more pleasant than removing the bolts. This suit was filled with various fluids and chemicals that made its systems work and he was about to remove it without taking the time to properly drain it. “Messy” was probably an understatement for what was about to happen.

According to the blueprint, the helmet had a locking mechanism on the back. It required two hands to press in the four pressure points at once, and a direct line of sight to see everything while it worked. Even if some intrepid soul had dared pry the metal out of their own body—not that anyone would ever be able to—the lock was tricky as well.

It took Curtis three tries, and that was from his good vantage point of standing over it. Almost five minutes in before he felt the mechanism click, and the seams along the sides opened up.

Now came the tricky part: removing it without doing any damage. The blueprint wasn’t especially clear, but Curtis took great care as he made sure the front of the helmet disengaged completely from the back, gently pulling the front up and forward as he removed it just in case he had read the shape of the inside right…

The sickening sound of thick liquid spilling out onto the floor sounded as he pulled the helmet away, the layer of an almost gel-like substance draining as it was no longer contained. The inside of the helmet was smooth to fit against the face, with a viewscreen that looked as if it were set in its own airtight area that settled over the eyes. Something like scuba goggles, a rubber-rimmed indentation that sat against the face. The viewscreen was colorless, and just as Kuro had said it didn’t reflect what it picked up in anything even remotely resembling slight. Lots of numbers, rows of fluctuating lines like some kind of polygraph, information running across the bottom of the screen. Curtis couldn’t fathom how somebody could understand it.

But what made him clench his teeth at the moment was the bottom rim of the viewscreen. Along the base of it was a sharp metal ridge, coated thickly in red. Curtis leaned forward to look down at Kuro, and the first place his eyes went were to the open gash across his nose. It was deep, angry, and undoubtedly painful, as if the metal were meant to dig into the skin and keep the helmet from shifting too much by anchoring right into the face.

A constantly jarred wound that by its nature would probably never be able to fully heal while the helmet was on. And one that when it finally healed now was going to leave a very familiar scar.

Aside from the gash across his nose, Kuro had a layer of facial hair covering the bottom of his face that helped to mitigate some of the shock of the features Curtis found himself looking at. Shiro had never really been able to grow a beard, even when he’d just left his face alone it never got terribly far. Just his genetic roll of the dice, and probably a good one for Kuro’s sake since there wouldn’t really be anywhere for longer facial hair to go.

Kuro’s skin was deathly pale, even more so than Shiro’s naturally was, thanks to the extended lack of sunlight. His face was coated with a thin layer of the gel and his eyes were scrunched up closed against the invasive light.

Curtis started to remove the back of the helmet, but then Kuro took a breath.

He immediately lurched forward, coughing and choking in a way that was visibly painful, contorting forward to straighten out his throat and help him get air. A thin, green-tinted liquid dripped from his nose and mouth, hitting the floor and then quickly evaporating away as if it had never been there.

Curtis had expected this, at least in theory, but he hadn’t been prepared for how awful it would look. The suit worked by filling Kuro’s lungs with a fluid that had high oxygen levels, that was how it got oxygen into his system without requiring him to breathe. The compound was made to evaporate when it came into contact with certain elements in breathable atmospheres, a sort of automatic lung draining that didn’t require medical intervention.

All in all, one more drop in the nightmare bucket.

Curtis stayed back until the coughing subsided, which took an uncomfortably long time. There was nothing he could do to help except stay out of the way, and that was perhaps the worst part. When it was finally over, Kuro slowly pushed himself back up on his knees and let his head fall tiredly back, panting heavily.

When he opened his eyes, Curtis felt like he’d been punched in the gut. Shiro’s silvery gray eyes, the exact same shade and shape, with the same impossibly long eyelashes, looked wearily up at the ceiling before slowly moving around the room. Curtis kicked himself into motion, making sure he made some noise as he moved so he didn’t startle his “patient,” and approached again to unfasten the much more accessible locks of the rest of the armor.

The breastplate came off next, the front pulling away. Curtis took great care in removing the back plate, feeling the resistance he knew would be there. He felt Kuro brace against it and pulled hard, wincing as it came free with an audible clicking noise.

It looked as disturbing as it sounded. Kuro’s torso was just as pale as his face, and also coated in a layer of the slick gel that lined the whole suit. But worse than that were the three holes at intervals down his spine, perfectly matched to the three plugs protruding from the inside of the armor’s back plate. They were large, similar in shape to microphone plugs. This was where the suit plugged into Kuro’s nervous system and brain.

Forget the nightmares, Curtis decided he might just not sleep for a while.

Kuro didn’t need his help shedding the rest, it was locked into place by the helmet and chestplate. Bit by bit he pulled it off and dropped it on the pile, moving slowly. Curtis backed away and leaned against the wall, letting him go.

He wore nothing under it but his skin, obviously, and that was covered with old scars that had likely been accrued before the exoskeleton had been finalized. His build was leaner than Shiro’s, probably thanks to the sheer calorie requirements it took to keep excessive muscle mass and far more time spent in lighter gravity. When he was done he sat back on his heels, looking like he didn’t really know how to react to being naked for the first time in so long. He didn’t seem bashful about it, just at a loss at the weight that was gone.

One thing was certain: thin beard had to go. His face was going to need bandaging and the facial hair would be in the way.

Curtis crossed the room to the safe, opening it farther and looking over its contents. He picked out a knife that looked sharp enough for the job, then turned back to Kuro.

“I need you to trust me for a few more minutes,” he requested. “Now, while you still have that conditioning gel on your skin to make this easier.”

Kuro looked up at him with wide eyes, his expression painfully similar to one he remembered on the faces of some of his first graders when they saw something shiny and new. It was a reminder that Kuro was seeing with his own eyes for the first time in years, and that this was probably the first time he was accurately hearing Curtis’ voice as well.

Curtis picked his way across the messy floor, careful not to slip on any of the goop that had leaked from the armor. He knelt down in front of Kuro and held up the knife so he could see it, but if Kuro felt threatened he didn’t show it. He seemed more enamored with the light glinting off the metal, as if for the moment he had completely forgotten there were things in this world that could cause him harm.

“Don’t worry, I do this out on rougher deployments all the time,” Curtis assured him, carefully tilting Kuro’s chin up. “Five minutes and you’ll be done.”

The gel really was helpful in letting the knife blade glide across Kuro’s skin as Curtis performed the rough shave job. He had shaved himself with a knife a few times before, but it was a little bit different doing someone else. At one point he nicked Kuro’s chin, but the other man didn’t even blink. Then again, it was probably an extremely minor sensation compared to what he’d been going through. By the time Curtis was done Kuro was pretty clean shaven, which just made him look disturbingly more like Shiro.

Kuro stared at him through the whole thing, like his features were fascinating. Shiny and new, Curtis reminded himself several times. There was nothing weird about him, he was just shiny and new.

When he finished he got up and took a look at the long braid, which he intended to unravel so Kuro could properly clean his hair. What he found was that at this point it was just one big knotted tangle that simply still resembled a braid, and was mostly unsalvageable.

That had to go too. Curtis retrieved the scissors from the medic kit upstairs and did the best he could to give it an even cut. He left Kuro’s hair at a little longer than shoulder length, more for himself than anything. He needed some kind of feature to interrupt how identical he was to Shiro, the hair color wasn’t enough.

“I think that’s it,” he announced as he tossed the tangled braid aside to be picked up later. He made a face, wiping his hands on a piece of cloth he’d been using as a rag. “Now you just desperately need a shower to get rid of this conditioning crap, and I can bandage your face.”

Kuro looked at him. More specifically, Kuro looked at his mouth. Curtis knew he understood the words coming out of it, but he seemed more enraptured by the sound of them than the idea of actually listening to them.

“Shower,” Curtis repeated, clapping his hands to break the spell. “Don’t slip on your way up the stairs.”

Kuro still didn’t say anything, but he got up and went slowly upstairs. He didn’t have any trouble walking, so the armor must not have been augmenting his strength at all. He’d been moving under his own muscle power. That was good; underpowered legs or something would have meant he’d need some kind of rehabilitation.

While Kuro was upstairs, Curtis set to work cleaning up to give himself something to do. He was tired and his hands were still sore, but the question now lingered as to what was going to happen from here. He was kind of stunned that Kuro had obeyed him without any kind of complaint, but he chalked that up to Shiro’s part of his personality.

Curtis would never deny that his ex-husband was a great leader and a competent decision maker, but if one used the right tone with him he still tended to do as he was told as long as it wasn’t something he specifically didn’t want to do. Curtis just wondered how much of his plan to get the hell off this planet and back to earth consisted of details Kuro specifically didn’t want to do.

He piled the armor outside, where it could be laid out once he figured out if there was a way here to hose it down, then used some of the scant cleaning supplies to clear up the mess on the floor. It took a little bit, but eventually most signs of what had occurred were gone. He still didn’t know how long he was cleaning, but this time he could tell it was a long time. Maybe forty-five minutes if he had to guess; the sun had gone down completely by the time he was done.

When he went upstairs to see what was taking so long he found the bathroom door open and leaned in to see if everything was all right. Kuro was standing under the spray with his eyes closed, and it looked like most of the hygiene product vials had been broken open and used. Curtis could only imagine the psychological effects of wearing that thing, he figured he probably would have repeatedly scrubbed himself down too.

He knocked on the open door just to remind Kuro that he wasn’t here alone, then stopped to grab the full medical kit on his way back down the stairs. As an afterthought he made another trip out to the small shed to grab a box of the rations there, bringing it in to go through it. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor reading the packages when Kuro came back down and stopped at the foot of the stairs, now dressed in some of the fresh clothes from the closet.

He looked a lot smaller without the exoskeleton, and far less threatening. His damp hair was combed and clean, shiny and black with a crisp streak of white running prominently through it from a patch at the front, and he was hugging himself a bit as if uncertain. Still, Curtis did not forget that this man was still dangerous even without his main weapon.

“I can patch up your face for you, if you want. Or the med kit’s here if you want to.”

Kuro took a moment to decide, then slowly came over and lowered himself to sit across from Curtis. He still hadn’t said anything yet, but he rested his hands in his lap and leaned forward a little to give clear access to his face. Curtis set aside the ration packets and pulled the med kit over, pulling out what he needed before starting to carefully clean the bit of blood that had begun to seep from the gash again.

“You went to the Academy in New Mexico.” Kuro finally spoke, stating the fact in a soft, calm voice that wasn’t quite as much like Shiro’s as Curtis had expected. Environmental factors, different stressors on his body, and the slightly different shape of his body overall had likely contributed to that. “And you were an officer on this…ship, under Takashi Shirogane.”

“Yes,” Curtis answered, trying to be careful not to cause any more unnecessary pain. “I was four years below Takashi in school so you wouldn’t know who I am, but I know Takashi very well now. So yes, I know where you came from.”

“When did you know?”

“I suspected as soon as I saw the name of the project on the cruiser,” Curtis admitted. There was no point in hiding anything. “But knowing doesn’t mean I didn’t think you were dangerous. It doesn’t mean I don’t still suspect that you’re dangerous. I’m just hoping my gut feeling that you would want to go home is also right, and that you aren’t going to turn on me now that you don’t need help getting free anymore.”

Kuro didn’t respond to that. The silence stretched on as Curtis started sizing up and trimming bandages for the right size and shape to patch him up.

“What did you mean when asked if this was a killing game?” Curtis asked, gently pressing the bandaging tape into place. “When I told you on the cruiser that Honerva was dead and you didn’t believe me?”

“Tests,” Kuro answered. His eyes had drifted closed while Curtis worked. “It’s how—it _was_ how she tested loyalty. She picked up slaves on the flesh markets, promised them freedom if they did what she asked. Then she’d have them wake us up and tell us they were helping us escape. Anyone who got to the point of open space and tried to leave instead of turning on the “enemy” and bringing them to her failed and she got rid of them.”

It was a chilling tactic, but Curtis had to admit that it was psychologically brilliant. Instill a mistrust in anyone who wasn’t her, and no matter how terrible she was she didn’t have to worry about her subjects trying too hard to escape.

It also explained why Kuro had headed deeper into Galra territory instead of trying to escape into space he would have known would eventually lead him at least to remnants of the Coalition. If Honerva were still alive, and this was one of those tests, he knew he would be dead before he got far. Leaving the hijacked cruiser and heading for a pre-existing safe house was a smart way to buy time while trying to figure out what was going on.

“She’s not here anymore to pass or fail you,” Curtis said, finishing up and closing up the med kit. “I promise you, she’s gone. The main threat now are factions of the fractured Galra empire fighting amongst themselves and still holding captured planets under their rule. There’s no Zarkon, there’s no Lotor, there’s no Honerva. It’s just civil war and chaos. Here.”

He offered one of the rations packets, another of the liquid nutritional packets like the one Kuro had given him back on the striker.

“Your stomach has to relearn how to eat. You should probably ease yourself from liquids to more complicated foods over the course of the next week or so.”

Kuro took it, snapping open the corner and sipping at it with far more indifference than Curtis could ever muster. He wanted to wince in sympathy from the memory of the taste alone.

“I want to clean up and go to bed,” Curtis announced, dragging himself up off the floor and smoothing down his clothes. He headed for the stairs, slowly starting to drag himself up. “And you must be going on two days now without sleep. Can we both agree to let each other rest without attempting a murder in the night?”

“I make no promises.”

Curtis paused and glanced down, but Kuro was fishing through the rations box and not looking at him. It was hard to tell if that was an honest statement, or a touch of Takashi Shirogane’s ever-present sarcasm shining through. Either way, Curtis decided it was probably a very good idea to sleep with a weapon this evening.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to doing some work on this again! And it only took me until a whole new year!

Years of covert work in enemy territory had honed Curtis’ instincts to the point where they functioned even when he was asleep. He was able to sleep anywhere with any ambient sound, that was a requirement when one didn’t know where or when they would get to rest, but he was still able to tell when something was off. It was that sense that someone was closer than they should be, that he was being watched and was unsafe.

When the surface he was lying on shifted under the weight of somebody moving nearby, Curtis snapped awake. He was sleeping on his back with one hand under the pillow his head rested on, his fingers wrapped around the hilt of a combat knife he had hidden there. He moved out of instinct, so quickly he was only able to identify that there was a shape far too close to him and not who it was before he slashed toward the unprotected throat.

His blow never made contact. A hand closed around his wrist with the snapping sound of skin against skin, bringing his arm to a full and complete stop. It shook Curtis into wakefulness, to find Kuro kneeling on the floor near him. The memories from the previous day flooded back to him as he rubbed his face with his free hand.

Curtis had laid claim to the bed last night, simply because he had wanted to push his luck and see what happened. He wasn’t sure where Kuro had spent the night, but he hadn’t put up a fight about it. From the way he was sitting on the floor, he had probably leaned against the bed and that was what had woken Curtis up.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Curtis breathed, tugging at his arm. “How long have you been there?”

Kuro’s grip was disturbingly strong, stronger than any normal man’s would be. Curtis’ tugging did nothing to move his extended arm, it remained fixed in space as if the force behind the pulling was negligible. He had always known that the clone body Shiro now wore was strong, but Shiro had never made a habit of using it or showing it off. Probably because he lived on Earth among normal people and didn’t have to.

“Two hours,” Kuro answered, with the confidence of a sociopath who didn’t find that the least bit disturbing. He seemed to finally notice Curtis trying to pull free and let him go. “Cumulative, not all at once.”

The qualifying statement did nothing to make Curtis feel any better. He wanted to ask why the hell Kuro would be watching him sleep, even in small shifts, but he thought he already knew the answer to that. Watching anything with his own two eyes was probably fascinating.

“Did you even sleep?” Curtis asked, making a face as he sat up and flexed his shoulders. The bed was made for utility, not comfort. “You were supposed to get some rest.”

“About ten minutes.,” Kuro answered. “Cumulative.”

Curtis maneuvered around him to stand up and stretch, and headed for the bathroom. Kuro rose with an annoying ease and followed, until Curtis closed the bathroom door directly in his face. He was still there when Curtis finished, standing right where the door had nearly hit him. Curtis sighed and gripped him lightly by the shoulders, moving him out of the way so he could pass and go downstairs.

Curtis went to the kitchen to get some water, then to the safe to pick through the weapons there, then to the computer to scan local signals. Finally, he stepped out the back door into the safehouse’s little yard area. He had no goal in mind, it was just an experiment, and as he predicted Kuro did nothing to stop him but shadowed him silently every step of the way.

He had seen the behavior before, in kids in his classroom. Neglected kids generally, ones who were touch-starved or desperate for some kind of attention. In Kuro’s case it would undoubtedly pass quickly, but for the moment he was enamored with the world around him. And like many humans who had been contact-deprived during the war, he was specifically attaching himself to the only other human nearby.

The sad part of Kuro’s reaction was that it didn’t even matter that Curtis didn’t mean him any harm. Obviously Kuro could defend himself and keep from being hurt, but he would be following around someone not quite so nice just as avidly. Anyone would be better, in his mind, than Honerva, even someone who did not have his well-being in mind.

Curtis still had to remind himself that the childlike wonder did not mean that Kuro was childlike in nature. He was a victim currently in the beginning stages of recovery, someone suddenly dropped into a world that had advanced by a decade without him. As tempting as it was to treat him like a child, he was a grown man who would undoubtedly become more confident as he regained his footing in a new world.

Curtis hoped that confidence would be a good thing, and would help him get home in one piece since he knew he couldn’t do it alone. As difficult as it was with the way Kuro was acting, he had to try not to patronize or treat him in a way that would alienate a confident adult.

He inspected the supplies in the shed one last time, during which Kuro finally wandered away. Curtis watched him go out of the corner of his eye and noticed two things: that Kuro had bandaged over the open wounds where the bolts had been removed, and that he was visibly limping.

“You’re going to have to see a doctor,” Curtis finally said out loud what he’d been dreading to say. Finding a doctor meant calling attention to themselves.

“What for?” There was something on the fallen tree that had Kuro’s attention, and he seemed to be actively trying to ignore the pain he was in.

“The…the holes in your bones?” Curtis pointed out. “The fourteen drill points you have in your skeleton? They’re all hollow. Obviously you can feel it.”

“So what about it?” Kuro asked, slapping both hands down on the tree trunk. “Bone heals.”

So what, bone heals. If that wasn’t a dumbass Takashi Shirogane statement, Curtis didn’t know what was. A first-year cadet at the Academy having a cold was something to worry and flit around about, but a huge personal injury was nothing.

“You have _holes_ in your _bones,_ ” Curtis repeated, kicking the shed door closed and putting his hands on his hips. He felt like he was back in his marriage, arguing with Shiro about whether he should go to the doctor. “Do you know why people don’t remove rods that are implanted to help breaks heal? Right now, the core of your body is exposed to infection. Your nerves could be damaged. And then the fun part…if you get into a fight, or even just put weight on one of those areas the wrong way, the bone might fracture.”

Kuro wasn’t looking at him. He was absorbed in whatever he was doing, which raised Curtis’ ire much more than it had any right to. He made his way over, nudging Kuro in the back of his shoulder.

“Are you listening to me?”

Kuro turned around and held up his cupped hands. He opened them, and Curtis suddenly found himself face to face with a pair of wide, bugging eyes just inches from his face. He let out a startled noise and backpedaled.

“I found a lizard,” Kuro announced. He looked at Curtis, raising an eyebrow at what he appeared to think was an overreaction. “And yes, I heard you.”

“Yeah? What did I say?”

“You have holes in your bones,” Kuro repeated dutifully. It did not escape notice that he made his voice very nasal, mocking the way Curtis spoke. “Do you know why people don’t remove rods that are implanted to help breaks heal? Right now, the core of your—”

“Okay, stop,” Curtis grunted in annoyance, waving both hands to cut him off. “Knock it off.”

“Do you have high blood pressure?” Kuro asked. “You seem like the kind of man who has high blood pressure.”

He said it with the indifference of one who somehow felt they were blameless for kidnapping somebody, damn near killing them with a heart failure in the flesh market, and then wiring them up to an electroshock tool in a barely day-long period that seemed specifically designed to cause high blood pressure.

“Hey, have you ever had a lizard shoved down your throat?” Curtis returned. “Asking for a friend.”

Kuro looked down at the lizard in his hands, cupping his fingers back around it and slowly moving it out of Curtis’ reach. Curtis gave a huff and headed back toward the house.

“Get rid of the lizard and get in here,” he called back sharply as he went.

So much for not getting flippant and for respecting Kuro as the dangerous weapon he had been intended to be.

On one hand, Kuro was clearly his own person. Curtis didn’t think Shiro would ever have taken another person with him during an escape, even if he thought it was a test. Shiro was the kind of straight and narrow person who drew a line and didn’t cross it, and he would never involve another person in a potentially dangerous escape even if he thought it was a trap. Shiro also would never have pulled what Kuro did down in the market, he would have lifted cash and a vehicle some other way. And if for some reason he had done either of those things, he would actually feel guilty about it.

Kuro was definitely far more morally ambiguous than Shiro was. He clearly didn’t have any regrets about what he’d done so far, and to be honest why should he? His actions had been rewarded with his freedom.

On the other hand, damn if this man didn’t have Shiro’s sarcasm and special gift for annoying.

“We need to have a serious conversation,” Curtis tried again, “but first things first. Have you eaten anything in the last few hours? Remember, you don’t have a system feeding nutrients directly into your bloodstream.”

The look on Kuro’s face told him that no, he had not. Curtis wasn’t a doctor, but he figured it would probably take more than just a few hours before Kuro started experiencing normal feelings of hunger to tell him he had to eat. Curtis reached the house and opened the door, motioning for Kuro to go in ahead of him.

He did, without so much as looking back. Kuro clearly didn’t feel like he was any kind of a threat at all. It was almost insulting, considering how well Curtis felt he’d done in turning the tables yesterday.

Curtis bypassed Kuro and went back to the kitchen, and unsurprisingly the other man followed him. Curtis gave him one of the rations packets and then took a look at the food Kuro had brought back after his supply run yesterday, judging the contents of the bags critically. It seemed like staples for this particular planet; a grain similar to rice, some kind of purple fruits with a thick skin, a container of orange berries, a package of a local flatbread. Most of the things actually looked pretty good, and Curtis hadn’t forgotten that they’d been purchased with him in mind. But none of it was really the kind of thing he wanted to have Kuro try to eat yet.

He settled for one of the purple fruits, going back to the main room and lowering himself to sit cross-legged on the floor. Kuro followed his example, but he winced visibly when he put weight on his hip at a certain angle. Curtis was beginning to doubt the wisdom of helping him out of the exoskeleton without a medical professional near, it was possible he was now at risk of so many more dangers than simply not being bulletproof.

What if he didn’t even have a normal human immune system? What of Curtis was carrying what would be considered harmless germs back on Earth, but were things Kuro had no immunity to and was now exposed? That exoskeleton might not have simply been keeping him captive, it might also have been his only biological protection.

It was all the more reason why he needed to get medical attention somehow. And that was undoubtedly going to add to the time it would take to get back to Earth.

“So first things first,” Curtis decided the best thing to do right now was just push forward, and cross bridges as they came to them. “This place…is it safe? I know it’s a safehouse, but what kind of danger are we in being on this planet?”

“On the surface? Not much,” Kuro sipped at the nutrition packet. The taste of the first one had probably been novel after having tasted nothing for years, but now his nose scrunched up slightly at the flavor. “This is a civilian colony planet. We’re at the edges of its civilization, only a fraction of the planet is populated. Its location in space makes it handy for supplies, so the commercial district here is lucrative, but that’s really the only reason the city sprung up in the first place. There are no seasons, the planet has no tilt. Go far enough north or south and everything is dead and frozen.”

“So no Galra bases or military installments?” Curtis asked.

“One or two small military bases that function as a National Guard, but that’s it,” Kuro answered. “And it’s so deep in Galra space they never see action and are pretty complacent. There is no outsider threat to the people here, they all just assume anyone they see walking free is either a loyalist stopping by from another planet or a half-Galra visiting.”

“You said it’s safe on the surface. How far out of the atmosphere before it gets dangerous?”

“As soon as you take off,” Kuro finished off the packet. “The planet is a neutral supply stop, and there’s a general agreement to leave the people alone. Or at least, there was ten years ago. The Galra are a warlike people, but they don’t attack civilians of their own kind unless they blatantly support another faction. The problem is, once you’re out in Galra airspace you have to have either a civilian travel visa or be a member of whatever faction happens to be out there harassing ships that day.”

It was good news and bad news. Good news, because there wasn’t an immediate threat that required them to get up and go, which meant time to plan and prepare. Bad news, because as soon as they were ready to go they were going to run into soldiers.

“Your Striker can get through that?” Curtis asked. “It has that backscan code for fake identification credentials, right?”

“Yes. As long as the ships take a broadcast code without question and aren’t out there boarding vessels for fun.”

So there was a possibility of getting into a firefight. If Kuro’s piloting skills truly came from Shiro, the they already had a very good chance of getting through something like that. But still, if they ended up hit and didn’t die right away, Kuro needed to be in fighting shape to be useful.

They were just going to have to be stuck here until he got medical attention. Curtis was not going to jeopardize an escape by approving it before the pilot was physically cleared.

“Okay, we need to find a doctor. And it has to be a doctor willing to look the other way when they look close enough to realize you’re not Galra, just in case the people here are as anti-outsider as their soldiers. Hopefully there’s some—”

“I’ll be seeing one of my contacts tomorrow night, they’ll have a surgical room I can use and a batch of human-compliant bone filler ready by then,” Kuro interrupted, seeming to grow tired of waiting for Curtis to move on from his condition. “It will be three days from the time I treat myself until the compound is solidified and settled enough to handle the pressurization changes of space. How long were you married to Shirogane?”

Curtis froze in peeling his fruit, taken aback at the sudden shift in Kuro’s tone and takeover of the conversation. He stared at the man sitting across from him, desperately trying to shift gears and find his mental footing.

“How did you…?”

“Come on, you’re a covert intelligence operative,” Kuro answered.

It dawned on Curtis then that even though he’d basically warned himself earlier, he’d still fallen into the trap of letting Kuro’s innocent behavior override his training. And now he was seeing that Kuro could and would take advantage when he did so, even if he was still recovering.

“The ring indentation?” Curtis asked, glancing down at his left hand after taking a moment to think back on the last day through Kuro’s eyes. “And the nagging about the doctor…and I called him “Takashi” when I talked about him.”

So Kuro was doing the exact same thing Curtis was, playing dumb to an extent to test the water and not show off what he was capable of right off the bat. That was another trait that Shiro didn’t have, he was a showman and always put his skills on display.

Fair enough. He supposed he should share at least some information if he wanted to be trusted.

“I met Shiro during the war with Honerva. With Keith being the Black Lion’s pilot and Allura in the Blue, his status as the Black Paladin with no lion earned him a leading spot on our war ship as soon as the Paladins made it to Earth. I was Communications Officer on the Atlas under him as Captain. We got close then, but because he was my direct superior officer we didn’t start a relationship until after everything ended. When the Atlas was scrapped to make smaller ships and Shiro retired, we got together and dated for four years. We were married for four more years after that, and divorced a year ago.”

“My condolences,” Kuro answered. “On the marriage. Congratulations on the divorce.”

Something in the information Curtis had just relayed had soured Kuro’s view of Shiro, that much was obvious. He could feel the tone of the conversation starting to change, as things from the past started to surface and cloud out any happiness that came with his current freedom.

“Voltron disappeared,” Kuro noted. “They were gone for years, it’s how Sendak had time to mount an invasion of Earth. Their ship self-destructed. How did they even get back?”

“If I answer, I get to ask the next question,” Curtis answered. “And you have to answer honestly.”

Kuro waved that off indifferently, undeterred. Curtis thought back to what Shiro and the Paladins had told him over the years.

“One of the other clones had been on the ship. He took Lotor and left some kind of virus,” Curtis continued. “Keith went after him and the others had to save the ship. The clone dropped Lotor off at Central Command then lured Keith away, Lotor made it back in time to start a fight with the others. Um…Keith followed the clone to what we all thought was the only Kuron Project site, during the fight he knocked the guy out and all the other clones got destroyed—”

“Killed,” Kuro corrected.

“I’m sorry?”

“You destroy things, they were people. People get killed.”

“Well, they were copies stored in pods,” Curtis backpedaled, now acutely aware that his view of the situation was probably extremely offensive to Kuro. “They never woke up or lived or anything.”

“They were fully developed and fully grown. They breathed, they dreamed. They were living people who never committed any crime except the way they were born, stuck in a forced sleep. But continue…they were killed in the fight. And then?”

“Keith knocked out the clone he was fighting and managed to call the Black Lion to save him before he burned up in the atmosphere with the pods,” Curtis said slowly. He knew the story well enough, but Kuro’s input about the clones being living people lent a whole new, uncomfortable dimension to everything. “Keith made it back, there was a fight. Lotor’s ship could go into the quintessence field, Voltron had to follow it. In the end Lotor lost, but all their in and out had caused tears in spacetime.

“They had to load up the Lions and leave their ship, overload the teludav and use its infinite mass to cause an explosion that would force all the holes closed with its gravity. The gravitational wave it sent out caught them up in a time dilation, so for them it was only a few minutes while for us it was years. They weren’t gone, they were just caught in the wave. After they got out, they made their way back to Earth. We overthrew Sendak, we got the Atlas in the air, and went after Honerva.”

“And Shiro was with them?”

Curtis knew Shiro’s story was what Kuro specifically wanted, and he’d known glossing over it wouldn’t fly, but hey, he had tried.

“It’s complicated,” Curtis frowned. “Shiro’s consciousness was apparently in the Black Lion, where it had been since a fight with Zarkon. In Alchemy, they can do this thing where they transfer a soul from one body to the next.”

“I’m aware. It was a facet of the Kuron Project.”

“Well, Allura took him out of the Black Lion and moved him into the clone body Keith brought back.”

Kuro looked at him with a frown on his face, as if waiting for further clarification. But there was nothing else for him to give, so Curtis remained silent.

“That’s it?” Kuro prompted. “They just moved him from a Lion to a clone? No protests, no discussions?”

“No?”

“So what about the clone?” Kuro asked the question Curtis had started dreading a few minutes prior. “She just moved Shirogane over with no regard for the fact that it was a living person?”

“Kuro, they were in a tight situation,” Curtis tried to be soothing. “The clone they were dealing with had literally just tried to kill Keith—”

“By programming,” Kuro said sharply. “There are chips in the brain stem, they turn off hormones and chemicals to shut down individual control so someone else can take over. Honerva tried to kill Keith, not the clone.”

“Do you have a chip in your brain?”

“ _We all have a chip_. Do you think somebody just wakes up one morning and decides they’re going to willingly let a megalomaniac lock them in a war suit?” Kuro asked hotly. “Do you think somebody who spent months fighting to bring down the Galra empire just randomly gets the urge to try and kill the people he’s been fighting beside?”

He was…not angry, but some version of it. Upset, Curtis decided. Very upset, in a way similar to how Shiro got. Like he was trying to vocalize but was mad at himself for being too hyped up for it to come out clearly, though Curtis was pretty sure he understood. The way Kuro used the word “we” and spoke about the experiences of a group rather than just himself, he did not see himself as singular or special outside of those like him.

“They were kids, Kuro,” Curtis was trying to be as gentle as he could. “Keith was the oldest and he was barely nineteen, not counting his two years in the Abyss with his mom. The others were eighteen, Katie Holt was years younger. The oldest two there were Coran and Krolia, and they didn’t understand Alchemy. If anyone there had known the full details of the Kuron Project and Allura had a little more experience, I know it would have been done differently.”

“But it wasn’t done differently,” Kuro answered. “So what happened? They all went back to Earth and Shirogane got to take credit with the Coalition for everything he didn’t do?”

This was quickly getting more and more uncomfortable. Kuro knew far too many details for a clone that hadn’t been involved at all, that was for certain. Curtis had used the names of the Paladins the day before because he’d hoped those names would have been part of Kuro’s programming, but he was beginning to get the feeling he was familiar with them from an entirely different perspective. It was starting to seem like the one alchemical transfer he saw in the Kuron Project records was far more significant than he’d originally thought.

“Were you…on the Castle of Lions?”

Shiro wasn’t known for getting angry, he had his little mantra and he sucked things up and tamped them down until nobody was around to see him show negative emotions. This trait was apparently an intrinsic facet of who he was that had been passed on to his clones. Kuro gave a soft snort and surged to his feet, wincing as he put pressure on aching bones. He walked away without answering, going up the stairs.

“Hey, wait!” Curtis called, scrambling to his feet to follow.

He reached the top of the steps as Kuro crossed the small bedroom and half-threw himself onto the bed, facing away from him and pulling the thin pillow over his head.

Curtis decided it was best not to push. He quietly retreated now that he knew what the other man was doing, backing down the stairs and running a hand through his hair.

“Well that was phenomenal,” he murmured to himself, rubbing his face as he went back into the kitchen.

The way he’d been speaking to Kuro had been based on the presumption that all memories of other humans were raw programming. Recorded from Shiro somehow, most likely through the prosthetic arm that was the suit prototype, and woven in with the other memories that were implanted. He had been speaking to Kuro as if he were simply a younger version of Shiro, who would be pleased to know that everyone was all right and had lived and gone on with their lives.

God, but that had been the wrong angle. Curtis had failed to look closely enough at the project files, he should have examined the sections regarding body transfer further. But he wasn’t an alchemist and he didn’t understand that stuff very well, so he’d mostly skipped over it in favor of the actual tangible facts of the weapon in front of him.

He was currently in the company of an actual younger version of Shiro, one who had experienced at least a span of time actively using that identity. He had lived in close quarters with the Paladins, he had fought with them, he had put his life on the line repeatedly for the Coalition.

Curtis tried to imagine what that would feel like. He tried to imagine what he would think if he was stuck here for years, then made it through this and returned to Earth only to find out he had just been a disposable copy dispatched into space. That the real Curtis had been off on another mission for a year and had returned while he was gone. How it would feel to find out that everyone he knew had simply stopped caring he was missing because the “real” Curtis was there and his fate didn’t matter.

Except even that didn’t really match the true horror of the situation. The reality was, people Kuro had undoubtedly genuinely cared about had turned on him while he was unconscious and blatantly murdered him in favor of somebody else. It had just happened to transpire that Honerva had already removed his consciousness, but if that hadn’t happened then Kuro would be dead. At the hands of people he trusted.

To make matters even worse, as if that were possible, the body that had been stolen from him was walking around perfectly happy.

Shiro had picked up right where Kuro had left off. Had been given—and taken without complaint—credit for his accomplishments. Shiro had faced off against Zarkon and he had died, if life were fair he would have passed on like anyone else. It would have been Kuro who Keith brought back, Kuro who they tried so hard to save in that healing pod, Kuro who would have continued the war as Captain of the Atlas.

Who knew? Maybe it would have been Kuro, who had been the Black Paladin for months while Shiro slept and arguably had more experience against their enemy, who could have saved Allura instead of losing her.

Curtis knew the story from the other side. He knew that none of what had happened had been done in malice, that the Paladins were children and that Allura had been desperately trying to follow in her father’s footsteps without the benefit of a mentor. And he was as guilty as anyone of thinking of Honerva’s clones as lifeless objects, purely out of ignorance rather than dislike.

There was no true bad guy in this situation except Honerva, and nobody involved was a winner.

Curtis had been in the kitchen for about five minutes when he heard footfalls on the stairs, followed by a door opening. It was left open, the fresh air wafting into the cramped little cottage, and warning bells went off that Kuro might be leaving. He stepped out of the tiny kitchen to find that it was the back door, and Kuro was across the yard by the fallen trunk again.

Leaning in the doorway to watch him move around, the limping wasn’t his only issue. He was beginning to develop circles under his eyes, clearly visible against his pale pallor, from a lack of actual sleep. Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to rest unless he was forced to, even if he was tired and wanted to.

He was likely too overstimulated. Being able to hear, see, touch, taste, smell…suddenly and in full, with no barriers, his brain was probably in overdrive. He was going to run himself into the ground trying to experience everything, like the colorful bird-like creature that had landed up in a nearby tree. Kuro saw it and started to climb up onto the trunk, and Curtis had flashbacks to watching young children fall off monkey bars after being told repeatedly to get down.

He had to force himself to step back into the house instead of yelling at Kuro not to climb. He was a grown man, the former Black Paladin apparently, if he wanted to risk breaking his leg he was going to do it no matter what.

Instead he went back to the kitchen to actually take stock of what was there instead of staring out at the wall in a daze, finally unpacking the food bags.

In addition to the fruit, rice, and flatbread, there was some kind of cured meat in a vacuum packaging and some various plants that were probably native vegetables. At the bottom of one bag Curtis found a small novel and two magazines, the kind of things that might be sitting on a rack near a checkout. There was also another one of the sweet cakes that had been given to him when he’d first arrived.

Curtis took it out of the bag, looking at it in a whole different light. The cakes weren’t an emotionless clone attempting to emulate human benevolence, they were a version of Shiro trying to mitigate the harsh things he felt forced to do with kindness. Because he was very much human, and in times of distress humans were often soothed by sweet things.

Curtis dug through the pantry and drawers, finding some basic kitchen tools. Not a lot of cooking went on in this place but there were some utensils. He managed to get the meat open and slice it up to make himself a sandwich with the flatbread, which he ate while he spent a few minutes struggling with a bowl and various knives and spoon-like instruments to smash the fruit and berries in the bowl.

It was not a gourmet kitchen, but after his excessive effort he was finally rewarded with a glass of mostly strained juice. He finished up the last of his sandwich, then went to go see if Kuro had managed to kill himself yet.

The other man was still in the yard, but now he was on the far side of it. He was kneeling on the ground, his hands buried in the grass and fingers dug deep into the soil, feeling the soft earth on his skin while he watched what looked like this planet’s equivalent of a squirrel nibble on some kind of root.

“You really should get some sleep,” Curtis advised.

“I’m not tired,” Kuro answered.

“Yeah, next you’ll be telling me you have a bridge to sell me,” Curtis answered. “Come on. Everything will still be here after you get some rest.”

Kuro knew Curtis was right, but he was still reluctant. It took another minute or so before he got up, clapping the dirt from his hands, and headed back toward the house. He still looked upset, and although Curtis hated to keep comparing him to Shiro he knew that if they were as alike as they appeared to be that Kuro wasn’t comfortable with having an audience for it. But his senses wouldn’t still enough to let him stay in the privacy of upstairs until he was calm.

“Here.” Curtis stopped him just inside the door and put the glass in his hands. “You should be able to stomach this, and it’s probably a lot better than those nutrient packets.”

Kuro looked at the glass suspiciously, sniffing it to try to identify it. Curtis couldn’t blame him since the color was a strange greenish one, but the fruity scent cleared up the mystery. Kuro took a tiny sip of what was probably his first actually appetizing food product in years, and it must have been good. He started to tip the glass back to drink it faster, and Curtis had to pull the glass down and stop him.

“Little sips,” he warned. “You want to keep it down.”

Curtis also wanted it to last for more than thirty seconds. Because Kuro was a human being, and in times of distress humans found sweet things soothing.

He had Kuro sit down against the wall with his glass, then went to go through the pile of tools he’d left in the corner the night before. He found something to remove the screws and set about taking down the wood covering the back window, peeling it back and letting sunlight filter into the little room. He opened up the window to let the warm outside air in, and then went to retrieve the pillow from the bed and the book and magazines from the kitchen.

Curtis put the pillow down on the floor by the wall, and lowered himself to sit on the other side of it. He patted it lightly.

“Lay down.”

“I’m not tired,” Kuro insisted again. The fact that his eyes were barely focusing told a different story.

“Then be not tired while lying down,” Curtis requested, patting the pillow again.

Kuro still didn’t do so. Curtis sighed, having hoped he’d have a little more time to craft the right words before he had to deliver them, but knowing Kuro deserved to hear them now.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For the way I talked about the people created by the project. And I’m sorry you had to learn the details about what happened afterward from me, because I only know enough to blurt out the worst.”

Kuro shrugged one shoulder, saying nothing. He looked more than tired, he looked beaten down. Years being sealed in a torture device hadn’t managed to break him, but finding out what his supposed “family” had done had come pretty close. Curtis had wanted to get him back to Earth before, but he definitely wanted to make sure Kuro made it now. This man was a veteran of the Imperial War and arguably one of its biggest heroes, and he deserved for people to know that.

Slowly, Kuro slid down the wall until his head came to rest on the pillow. He lay where he landed, in a limp sort of pile, like a teenager who had been rejected after asking his crush to prom. Gingerly, Curtis reached over to lightly rub his shoulder.

“Just a couple hours,” he encouraged. “I’ll be sitting right here, awake to keep watch.”

Kuro lay still for a few minutes, and Curtis picked up one of the magazines. They were imported, he could tell because they were written in the standard form of Galran he understood. He was about three pages in when Kuro suddenly flipped himself over and buried his face in the pillow.

Curtis waited to see if he was going to have to stop him from getting up, but Kuro stayed down. He remained still for another few minutes, then flipped over again.

On his side. On his stomach. On his back. Pillow under his head, pillow over his head, pillow folded in half to be both. It was no wonder that Kuro hadn’t slept at all the night before, he was completely incapable of remaining still for more than a few minutes at a time, and it didn’t appear to have anything to do with comfort.

Finally, as he tried to flip over again, Curtis reached over and took away the pillow.

He slid over, careful not to knock over what was left of the juice, and pulled Kuro down to lie with his head on his thigh. When he was down he put the pillow over his head to block out the light and noise, then rested his magazine on the pillow.

Kuro heaved a long-suffering sigh, but didn’t pull away. Curtis added a little more pressure, and eventually he remained still.

Although Kuro hadn’t tried to touch him at all while following him around, the close tail was a cry for attention. So was the fact that he was fairly quick to listen and come back in the house even though he was upset and wanted to be alone, and the way he obediently sat when he was told. People needed touch, even if it was as minor as regular handshakes or a pet lying in their arms, and even if they didn’t really know that was what they needed.

The gentle pressure helped to alleviate the sensory overload, and Kuro could probably feel Curtis’ pulse and breathing from his position. He had soothed his nieces and nephews to sleep in the same way when they were younger, when imaginations ran wild with monsters under the bed and they would come crawling up onto the sofa to sit next to him instead.

After a few minutes, Curtis could feel him start to relax completely as he finally drifted to sleep. The monsters that were bothering Kuro ware far worse than any that had ever plagued the children, but Curtis hoped that he could keep them at bay long enough for the other man to get desperately needed rest.

 


End file.
